Speccie: Backchat
 

Only Bill kept the Sphere in business this week. Congratulations to him. The new competition will, I think, attract more attention from our poets.


No. 2676: Backchat
You are invited to submit a reply to the poet from Wordsworth’s cuckoo or Keats’s nightingale (16 lines maximum). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 1 December.

Reminds me of the old classic test question (author forgotten):

"O cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering voice?"

State the alternative preferred,
With reasons for your choice.

Cuckoo

O poet, shall I call thee bard
Or just another twitcher?
I know the writing game is hard
And seldom makes you richer.

These woods and hills are like a church
And you are like a vicar
Enraptured by your endless search
For the Elysian liquor.

Your single sanctifying word
Can elevate the lowly
And change me from a robber bird
To something high and holy.

I am sincerely grateful for
Your verses neatly inked,
For should this planet warm some more
I may become extinct.

I like that one, John, especially the last stanza.

Gail, I believe that many people think that Auden wrote those lines, though no one can is sure.

Nice neat one, John. Until 2006 (on Dartmoor) I hadn't heard a cuckook for some thirty years, so the idea of their disappearance from the British Isles is hard to avoid.

Dear Wordsworth, really, no soft soap,
How nice you were to me!
You called me blessed, darling, hope,
A love, a mystery.

That other William - Stratford pest!-
Lent no such well-tuned ear;
My name - an all-too-facile jest -
He labelled ‘word of fear’.

Yet both my poets, deeply stirred,
Would put Time in the dock
To know that now I’m mostly heard
Inside some damned Swiss clock!

I hear them all the time in Canterbury, you will be glad to hear. And the number of barn owls, sparrow hawks and yellowhammers seems also to be increasing. Also buzzards. Never saw buzzards in Kent ntil a couple of years ago. Now they are all over the place. Oh and we have nightingales, lots of them. And something called an egret which I had seen only on Edwardian ladies' hats. Oh, and bitterns. Defintely bitterns.

I gave up trying to make the nightingale Keatsian, so made him a bit of a chav instead.

Darkling I've listened, too, while you orate
About my warbling till I've grown quite shirty.
John, mate, I'm singing to attract a mate,
Not “pouring forth my soul”- just being flirty.
That's what birds do. You think it's “rich to die”?
Well, we like life ('cause birds' lives are not long)
And it should need no genius to know why
We sing the old old song -
You're in a gloomy and romantic muddle.
Why not hop round to Fanny's for a cuddle?

Or hop somewhere. The lovely female birds
Won't come here if a poet's by my tree.
They want some action, not your gloopy words -
So kindly leave me be
To maximise my chance of jig-a-jig,
Before the day when I fall off my twig.

George, really jolly, surely a winner. John, glad to hear about the Kentish nightingales. I've only heard them in Spain. (Singing in daylight). Plenty of egrets in Devon now, but bitterns? Do you live by a reed-bed?

Nice one , George. Jerome, we have reed beds all over the place. The only thing we don't have are red squirrels. They have them on the Isle of Wight. But then you'd have to live on the Isle of Wight.