[FOsen]

We stood, my mother, there, and I.
To keep her still and men in awe—
and yet you will weep and know why—
I bought myself a Wonderbra.
This debt we pay to human guile,
some healthful anodyne,
you say you love, but with a smile
both funny, racy, and divine.

For I am bound with fleshly bands,
a cuckoo's bomb lies in the nest
(how statue-like I see thee stand):
two hundred to adore each breast.

No age could furnish out a pair,
so buxom, blithe, and debonair.



Austin, “Leszko, the Bastard”
Shakespeare, "Pericles"
Hopkins, “To a Young Child”
Ayres, "Wonderbra"
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”
Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
Keats, “You say You Love”
McGonagall, "Robert Burns"
Christina Rossetti, “Elysium”
Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate
Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
Poe, "To Helen"
Swift, “Stella’s Birthday”
Milton, “L’Allegro”

-- Frank

[basil ransome-davies]

Some good stuff here. I'm beginning to think I cut my own throat by by publicising this comp.


bazza

[John Whitworth]

It's the sportsman in you, Bazza. Anyway, you've got two excellent lines. Only twelve to go!

Nice one, Frank, as usual. Pericles! Oh, I think you've spelt McGonagall wrong.

[FOsen]

Thank you for again serving as my proofreader, John. My excuse - and, Baz, as payback - this is sending me off this morning with no sleep.

Was McGonagall sort of a 19th century version of Tiny Tim? Nobody can hit that many clinkers and not know it - I particularly like the one I selected.

Frank

[Orwn Acra]

How can you not like Tiny Tim's "Living in the Sunlight, Loving in the Moonlight"?

This one is hard because I don't know Austin or Ayres and I'm trying to do it by whatever lines pop into my head. But lines don't pop into your head when you don't know them!

[basil ransome-davies]

Now is the winter of our discontent
In an immense wood in the south of Kent,
And no birds sing
(Comforter, where, where is your comforting?),
And we are here as on a darkling plain –
Rapture and woe unreconciled, and pain –
Made of nothing!

Skulled horses whinny for the soot of night,
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
All that said and done,
So sicken waning moons too near the sun.
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Peacefully, on and on.


1 Shakespeare, Richard III
2 McGonagall 'Grif, of the Bloody Hand'
3 Keats, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'
4Hopkins, 'No worst, there is none'
5 Arnold, 'Dover Beach'
6 Austin, 'A Poet's Eightieth Birthday'
7 e. e. cummings, 'no time ago'
8 Robert Lowell, 'Night Sweat'
9 Milton, 'Light'
10 Pam Ayres, 'He never leaves the seat up'
11 Dryden, 'Annus Mirabilis'
12 Wallace Stevens, 'Sunday Morning'
13 Allen Tate, 'Ode to the Confederate Dead'
14 Elizabeth Bishop, 'The Moose'

[John Whitworth]

Yours is the most poetical offering so far, Bazza, which may be bad news as I've never thought of the Staggers that way. It reminds me of that lyric 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' and I mean that as a compliment. Actually, no it doesn't. It is much better and it DOES make sense.

Orwn, I think you can get some Ayres off the internetand the OLD Oxford Book of Nineteenth Century verse has three poems by Austin. Again, there are some on the internet.

Ayres' best known line is ' I wish I'd looked after my teeth' and Austin is immortalised in a couplet.

Across the wires the electric message came,
'She is no better. She is much the same.'