Spectator competition winners: Edward Lear and Pam Ayres write dirges

In Competition No. 3182 you were invited to rewrite a famous piece of light verse with a dirge-like, hieratic tone (as if we need any more doom and gloom).

Robert Schechter put a downer on light verse supremo Ogden Nash’s pithy ‘Reflections on Ice-Breaking’, ‘Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker’:

Time is a burden we mortals must carry,And in the great darkness our lives are a flicker,So heed me: though sweets may seduce, do not tarry.Life’s