Spectator competition winners: ‘Toilets’ by T.S. Eliot (anagrammatic poems)

The inspiration for the latest challenge — to rearrange the letters of the names of poets (e.g. Basho: ‘has B.O.’) and submit a poem of that title in the style of the poet concerned — was puzzle writer and editor Francis Heaney’s wonderful Holy Tango of Literature, which includes such delights as William Shakespeare’s ‘Is a sperm like a whale?’, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Dreary Hot Pork’ and William Carlos Williams’s ‘I will alarm Islamic owls’. The anagrammatic titles that caught my eye in a vast and stellar entry included ‘Naughty Nude Wash’ by Wystan Hugh Auden (David Shields) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Ode to a Large, Slimy Ulcer’ (Max Gutmann). Hats off, too, to Robert Schechter’s one-line ‘Toilets’ by T.S. Eliot: ‘Let us go then, you and I’. The prizewinners, in what was a hotly contested week, are printed below and snaffle £25 each.

‘Oxen Appareled’ by Alexander Pope/Hugh King A fool might clothe his muddied cows in silk And claim they therefore yielded finer milk, Or give the grunting sow a laundered frock That he through her might breed a purer stock, Or throw upon his ox a velvet cloak To hide the heavy burden of the yoke.