Spectator competition: perverted proverbs

This week you are invited to provide a poem, in the manner of Harry Graham’s Perverted Proverbs, questioning the wisdom of a popular proverb. Perverted Proverbs, A Manual of Immorals for the Many was published in 1903 under the pseudonym Col. D Streamer. In it, Graham, who is probably best known for his Ruthless Rhymes (1898), a forerunner of Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, calls into question, with wit and dark humour, popular proverbs such as ‘Virtue is Its Own Reward’. Here is a taste to inspire you:

Virtue its own reward? Alas! And what a poor one as a rule! Be Virtuous and Life will pass Like one long term of Sunday-School. (No prospect, truly, could one find More unalluring to the mind.)

Please email entries of 16 lines maximum to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 25 September and mark them Competition 2817. Here are the results of this week’s challenge, in which competitors were asked to to describe how a great writer stumbled upon an idea that he or she later put to good use.