In Competition No. 2865 you were invited to compose a poet’s elegy for him or herself. This challenge took you down a path trod by poor Chidiock Tichborne, who wrote his own elegy, ‘Tichborne’s Elegy’, in 1586, on the night before his execution, aged 28, for his part in a conspiracy against Elizabeth I.
You were all good this week. Commiserations to Peter Smalley, Barbara Smoker, Max Ross, Sylvia Fairley and Chris Gleed, who narrowly missed the cut.
The winners earn £25 each. Brian Allgar trousers £30.
I’faith, I cannot say which is the worse:
To fade into oblivion, forgot,
Or for my shade to live on through my verse
And mock me that it is, when I am not.
When I have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Sans eyes, sans other bits, sans everything,
Shall people say ‘God rest him from his toil’,
Or ‘Dead, you say? Ne’er mind, the play’s the thing’ ?
I have gone here and there to slake my lust
And slake my thirst, yet lust and thirst shall end;
Like chimney-sweepers, I must come to dust,
Though words live on.
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