Gosh, you make me feel as if I've won already, so if I don't at least I'll always know I had endorsements from those whose opinions really matter to me!

Thanks, Annie and Bazza.

Jayne

For I will consider my dog Percy

A dog starved at his master's gate,
he eats his victuals fast enough.
Oh fat white doggie whom nobody loves,

oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit,
a huddled mastiff yearning to breathe free;
hope springs eternal in the canine breast.

Whilst thou art barking forth thy soul abroad
wagging thy tail in sprightly dance—
Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame?

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets.
By thy long white ears and quivering nose
now wherefore stopp'st thou at this tree?

"Is it weakness of intellect, doggie?" I cried.
The dog was ours before we were the dog's.


Apologies to: Christopher Smart, Wm Blake, AE Housman, Frances Cornford, Ezra Pound, Emma Lazarus, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Wm Wordsworth, Robert Graves, TS Eliot, ST Coleridge, WS Gilbert, Robert Frost

Err ... very nice, Esther, but haven't you changed some of the original words?

yes, Brian, I know it isn't kosher; I always cheat when I do centos.

http://www.umbrellajournal.com/summe...ies/Panto.html

I guess this just shows how tastes differ.. I'm enjoying this challenge, and really enjoyed the Shakespeare anagram one (though didn't win anything..)

Esther,
Heehee, your 'Panto' poem's funny! Thanks for the link. I like your doggie one too, even if it's not quite what this comp is calling for.

"hope springs eternal in the canine breast." I think it does, more often than not!

Jayne

Having spent a while on this it has been a treat to now read the poems you others have come up with. Hearty laughter ensued! My own isn't quite in that vein. I am uncertain of its worth, having neglected scansion. My rhymes are lax and few.


The Mariner’s Encounter

Round many western islands have I been.
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
I wandered lonely as a cloud;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Then after roaming far and wide
Shop after shop, with symbols, blazoned names,
I came upon her without warning,
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Finding thy worth a limit past my praise,
Full beautiful – a faery’s child!
Handsomest of all the women,
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot;
And now it is an angel's song,
"O stay," the maiden said, "and rest
In the tea-shop’s ingle-nook.

Sources:

John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
William Topaz McGonagall, The Tay Bridge Disaster
William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
WB Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Robert Service, The Quest
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, book 7
Robert Graves, Darien
AE Housman, Loveliest of Trees

William Shakespeare, Sonnets, LXXXII
John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, IV
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hiawatha’s Wooing
Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, Fit the Second

Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric, 5
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, V
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Excelsior
John Betjeman, In a Bath Tea-Shop

Well, having sweated blood over this one so far (and it's by no means over), I don't see why you co-conspirators shouldn't get spattered with some of the droplets:

In a vision once I saw
(The reason why, I cannot tell)
Only this, and nothing more -
The lovely lady, Christabel,
Talking of Michelangelo,
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax.
Gazing where the lilies blow,
She gave her father forty whacks
Or in the heart, or in the head,
O'er rocks and stones following the dog ...
His Grace! Impossible! What, dead?
Body in the bog?

The grave’s a fine and private place;
I measured it from side to side,
Took the face-cloth from the face -
The dog it was that died!

Sources:
Coleridge - Kubla Khan
Tom Brown - I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
Poe - The Raven
Coleridge - Christabel
T.S.Eliot - The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Lewis Carroll - The Walrus and the Carpenter.
Tennyson - The Lady of Shalott
Popular rhyme about Lizzie Borden
Shakespeare - Tell me where is Fancy bred
Wordsworth - Fidelity
Swift - A satirical elegy
Seamus Heaney - Punishment
Marvell - To his coy Mistress
Wordsworth - The Thorn
Tennyson - Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead
Goldsmith - Elegy on the Death of a mad Dog

I think that's wonderfully hectic.. especially at the end!

Do the people who set these magazine competions have a go themselves, do you think? Just to try out the practicalities?

Welcome, Graham,
It's nice to see a new member heading straight for D & A! :)

"Do the people who set these magazine compet[it]ions have a go themselves, do you think? Just to try out the practicalities?"

(Sorry, Graham, in my role as Deputy Word Nerd Police Officer I had to correct your spelling above.)
But, to answer your question: personally I'd say, "No, I don't imagine they do." I could be wrong, of course.

I think your 'Mariner's Encounter' is a valiant effort at a stinker of a contest, but - for me, at any rate - some lines are just too incongruous in the places you've put them, such as S1L4. It doesn't fit, whereas S2 does. S3 continues the 'story' but then the last stanza makes it go a bit awry.

This is only my humble opinion, FWIW, but I think you have a nice premise here, if you can tweak it into a slightly more coherent form.

Jayne