Spectator competition winners: stories behind the composition of famous poems

In Competition No. 3336 you were invited to supply the story behind the composition of a famous poem.

This challenge drew a smart and diverse entry that proved tricky to whittle down to a prizewinning half-dozen. But after lengthy consideration, D.A. Prince, Brian Murdoch and Paul Voogt are awarded commendations and those printed below earn their authors £25 each.

Dear Marlowe, so, you want to write poems to impress the London girls. Well, sonnets are still hot with the nobility, but let me tell you, Kit, rural idylls are all the rage! Think cheeping birds, pastoral imagery, sexy allusions to hills and valleys. Passionate, liberal shepherds go down a treat. The ladies go mad for tanned, strapping country swains and romps in the hay. Aim for sunny springtime, lambs, frisking, frolicking. Add a May morning reference; every lass longs to play May Queen. Avoid blunt mentions of rams or tupping. Concentrate on wanton airs, dalliance, pleasures. Throw in a green cornfield, sweet lovers, the pretty ringtime, a hey nonino or two. Promise them pretty flowers, clothes made of gold, pure wool, silver dishes. They’ll be unlacing your breeches before you can say ‘codpiece’. Enjoy your fun, but don’t forget to finish writing those plays, you lusty alehead. Yours, Shakespeare.

Janine Beacham

Baltic Dry, we nicknamed the oldest shipping clerk in the Firm, partly after the maritime index of which he was a devotee, mostly on account of the tedium of his conversation, which began and ended with work. On the much-delayed occasion of his retirement, the question of a parting gift arose. None of us could recall his expressing a liking for anything other than impeccably alphabetised Letters of Credit, but a junior clerk, Chivers, recalled the old man, having not one whit of it in his deracinated soul, absolutely hated poetry. It proved surprisingly cheap to commission from a man named Masefield, a rising versifier of the day, a poem confected entirely from a slyly borrowed selection of Baltic Dry’s old Bills of Lading.