The Oldie Bouts Rimés by 5th April
 

Here you go - we love the bouts rimés, don't we, and we're good at this sort of thing, so let's show them just how good we can be!
(I've won it twice, when 1st place got a bottle of single malt Scotch as the bonus) :)

Jayne


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe Oldie Competition no. 162
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxby Tessa Castro

Time for the annual bouts rimés. Write a poem of 14 lines, please, with these words as the rhymes in the order given: plains, day, away, stains, pains, May, play, rains, leaves, suns, sheaves, breath, runs, death.

Entries to ‘Competition 162’ by post (The Oldie, 65 Newman Street, London W1T 3EG), email (comps@theoldie.co.uk) or fax (020 7436 8804) by 5th April 2013.
Don’t forget to include your postal address.

I'm sure you'll all do better than this, even though Keats had it easier since no one told him what rhymes he had to use:

After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains.
The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves
Budding—fruit ripening in stillness—Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves—
Sweet Sappho's cheek—a smiling infant's breath—
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs—
A woodland rivulet—a Poet's death.

Roger,
Not only is it harder to do with all the rhymes stipulated, but I'd guess that you've done it faster than Keats would have.
14 lines in an elapsed time of well under two hours.
Impressive!

Douglas, Roger was implying that the poem he posted is by Keats.

Susan

Well, That does put a different light on it. Still, one has to know his Keats pretty well in order to pick out the right poem from a batch of rhymes.

A Life Well-Lived; James Earl Carter
 

A Life Well-Lived; James Earl Carter

This sturdy Georgia farm boy, born in Plains
Had worked his father’s peanut fields each day,
Until at age eighteen he went away
To learn to sail; then got saltwater stains
For seven years, until relieved of pains
To rove the world. Returning home in May,
And growing skilled at politics, he'd play
The power game like sunshine follows rains.

He reached the Apex, then like autumn’s leaves,
Fell back to Earth, and felt the cooling suns
Of Fame. Then God said “Gather ye the sheaves
To feed thy meekest brethren. Use thy breath
And strength to shelter those whose lives had runs
Of Fortune worse than thine; and challenge Death."


I have one factual error in this. How much poetic license is allowed?

Here's my first try...
 

Eleanor Graves, 14; Donner Pass, February 1847

I dreamt about it all across the plains:
a kingdom-come, an everlasting day
for idling weeks and weeks and years away,
forgetting crowded wagons and the stains
of trail dirt. Not that heaven'd lack for pains.
It might get dreary: months of sunshine May.
A girl could run clean out of ways to play,
and even California sometimes rains.

I still dream in this forest of no leaves,
whose fetid pools reflect the chillsome suns
of days as cruel as knowledge of the sheaves
we shed as deadweight down below. My breath
grows short. I long to float where the river runs
and so live ever, not just swoon to death.

LA GRANDE PEUR

As Tory toffs scan France’s vasty plains
and dream of rescue, as on Dunkirk’s day,
their shrivelled minds, like small ships, slip away,
puffed on by sails bereft of bankers’ stains
and crewed by uncomplaining churls, whose pains
of poverty and loss they mock, while May
plots to resile from Human Rights and play,
like night and fog, with all on whom there rains,
their reign’s harsh hand. This faux armada leaves
our times for those, which needed no two suns
to light its Empire’s day, whose sweated sheaves
paid for such prideful rule with slavish breath.
Unlike two Churchills, in toff blood there runs
fear of free Europe and their Party’s death.


I doubt if this will chime withThe Oldie's prejudices - though two Churchills might just give them pause!

The Dong Sonnet

The Dong, across the great Gromboolian plains,
Follows his nose for ever and a day.
Born to an endless grief, he lopes away
Towards a golden west whose sunset stains
The sky, fashioning songs to ease the pains
Of hopeless Love, to make October May.
One song to sad guitar he likes to play,
A plaintive ditty, redolent of rains
And long Autumnal melancholy, leaves
Him weeping, weeping, for the happy suns
He knew when innocence bound up the sheaves
Now dried and withered by the bitter breath
Of knowing better. Mark him as he runs
His race, forever westering to Death.

Though I do know Keats fairly well, I confess that I got an assist from Google.