In Competition No. 3130 you were invited to add to Sam Leith’s lines about Boris Johnson, written in the metre of Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’: ‘Mayor of London Boris Johnson/ Much admired the lady’s pole-dance/ Mentored well her start-up business…’
Though Longfellow has long fallen out of fashion, in his day he was a poet celebrity, imitated by Baudelaire, parodied by Lewis Carroll and outselling Browning and Tennyson (he was also the first American to be honoured with a marble bust in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey). The poet J.D. McClatchy, writing in the New York Times, noted that on Longfellow’s 70th birthday it was proclaimed that ‘there is no man living for whom there is so universal a feeling of love and gratitude, and no man who ever wore so great a fame so gently and simply’.
What we’ll all be saying about Boris when he hits 70 remains to be seen but in the meantime, here are some reflections, in your best trochaic tetrameter, on how he’s doing so far.
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