Spectator competition winners: is August the cruellest month?

The latest competition invited poems in praise or dispraise of August. There was a whiff of collusion about the entry this week, so many references were there to rubbish television, rubbish weather, fractious kiddies, tired gardens, traffic jams; as Katie Mallett puts it: ‘A turgid time of torpor and delay.’ But there were some sparkling, inventive turns too. David Silverman was on pithy form:

Oh, thou cruellest month! If August comes, then winter Can’t be far behind.

And hats off to A.H. Harker’s well-made nod to Eliot, to Paul Freeman and to W.J. Webster, a rare but eloquent fan of August. The winners take £30 and John Whitworth pockets £35.

John Whitworth August, August, it’s the tops. August tastes like lollipops. August in the midday sun, Everybody having fun. Summer days will last for ever. Boys are bathing in the river. Girls in cotton dresses go Up and down and to and fro. Perfect in their loveliness Like the girls of Lyonesse, Free from worry, free from care, Happy faces everywhere.