Spectator competition winners: Foggily-froggily/ Michel B. Barnier…: topical double dactyls

The latest competition, a wildly popular one, invited you to compose topical double dactyls. The double dactyl was dreamed up in 1951 by the poet Anthony Hecht and the classical scholar Paul Pascal. My well-thumbed copy of Jiggery-Pokery, a wonderful 1967 compendium of the form edited by Hecht and the poet John Hollander, reveals with pride that Auden (to whom the book is dedicated) used the form ‘thrice’ for the choruses in his Aesopian playlets Moralities. Double dactyls generally bring out the best in you, and this comp elicited an entertaining parade of double dactylic notables — and pursuits egomaniacal, unoligarchical, prosecutorial, heterosexual, philoprogenitive… The winners earn £15 each, but in a strong field Bill Greenwell, Penelope Mackie, Philip Roe and J. Kerr shone too.

Hugh King Foggily-froggily Michel B. Barnier, Consummate bureaucrat, Raises the price,

Crushing the will of our Flummoxed and browbeaten Plenipotentiaries Held in his vice.

Nick MacKinnon Higgledy piggledy Pastuso Paddington gets himself banged up in Pentonville gaol. 

Even the lairiest anarctophiliac joins in the whip-round for Paddington’s bail.

Adrian Fry Mopily-ropily, Manchester’s Morrissey Goes back to crooning, his Novel a fail.

Hoping his audience, Hari-karistically, Still want to hear a man Tunelessly wail.

W.J.