Spectator competition winners: deflationary couplets

In Competition No. 3173 you were invited to give a fresh twist to a well-known single line of poetry by adding a line of your own to it.

This was a wildly popular competition, and my inbox was flooded with entries. Many of you were thinking along the same lines, which produced a fair amount of duplication. There were lots of variations on this topical adaptation of Wordsworth, courtesy of John Priestland: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,/ As household mixing’s not allowed.’ And on this new slant on Milton, from Iain Morley — ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new/To tear them up for dear old HS2.’ D.A. Prince’s take on Yeats — ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree/ In case the Government decrees that we must be Tier Three’ — was echoed frequently elsewhere in the entry.

The winners, printed below, pocket a fiver per couplet.

I wandered lonely as a cloudAnd uttered filthy thoughts aloud.Basil