Spectator competition: autumnal nonsense poems

In Competition No. 3324 you were in-vited to submit nonsense verse on an autumnal theme.

W.J. Webster confessed that ‘sense kept breaking in’ to his entry, but the line between sense and nonsense is not always clear. As Anthony Burgess observed, in a review of Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber Anthology of Nonsense Verse, Mr Grigson ‘wisely evades, in his preface, anything like a definition of nonsense. He knows that we will only know what nonsense is when we know the nature of sense. Nonsense is something we think we can recognise, just as we think we can recognise poetry, but there has to be an overlap with what we think we can recognise as sense.’

The winners below earn £25.

’Tis conkery and the glumptious drupes

are ruttling in the busky groove;

all slipshious are the treddly stoops

and the wild greetlings croove.

The scarvish dawns, the doofly nights,

the wrappit snaps of blainy chill:

beware the flewsome germlies’ flights

and the coffly Covigill.