Spectator competition winners: poems about great works of art

In Competition No. 3341 you were invited to submit a poem about a great work of art –  a challenge prompted by George Steiner’s observation that ‘the best readings of art are art’.

The writer Geoff Dyer has cited W.H. Auden’s 1938 ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ –  about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ and our relationship to suffering – as an example of this: (‘About suffering they were never wrong,/ The old Masters: how well they understood/ Its human position…/ …how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster…’).

So Nicholas Hodgson’s smart take on Auden’s poem came as no surprise (‘About suffering they were never right,/ The Old Masters;/ They should have known that what the public wants/ Is disasters…’)

In a hotly contested week – high fives  all round, but especially to Nicholas Hodgson, David Silverman, Sylvia Fairley, John O’Byrne, Richard Norman and Jane Blanchard – the winners, printed below, take £25.

Shoot me now, says Mariana,
Off me quickly, life’s a drag –
Love is constantly manãna,
All I do is lollygag –
I am emptied, I become null,
Suffer self-destructive feelings –
Sick of everything autumnal:
Leaves are coming through the ceiling.
See