Spectator competition: poets’ selfies (plus: liven up something mundane with a dose of magic realism)

The latest challenge, to compose a poet’s elegy for him or herself, took you down a path trod by poor Chidiock Tichborne. He wrote his own elegy, the poignant ‘Tichborne’s Elegy’, in 1586, on the night before his execution, aged 28, for his part in a conspiracy against Elizabeth I. Nicholas Stone’s entry, in which he channels the inventor of the clerihew, E.C. Bentley, is rather more upbeat:

Edmund Clerihew Bentley Slept fairly contently; But at his life’s close He found total repose.

And Mae Scanlan came up with neat twists on Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest’ and Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’. In fact, you were all good this week. Commiserations go 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.

Brian Allgar/Shakespeare 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.