In Competition No. 2416 you were invited to reduce the life story of a famous person or a fictional character to three limericks.
I was strict about metre and rhyme. A limerick is technically a very conventional form of poetry, and so when my ear was offended I turned my thumb down. And I was certainly not going to countenance ‘neuralgia’ rhyming with ‘Trafalgar’! A third criterion was the necessary biographical element demanded by ‘life story’. Iain Crawford wrote tellingly about John Lennon, but spleen overwhelmed history. Commendations to him, Bernadette Evans, Brian Murdoch and Dominica Roberts. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver is Colin Sydenham’s.
At his birth he was maimed and then spurned,
But soon saved and adopted. He learned
He was fated to slay
His papa; straightaway
His face from his homeland he turned.
On
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