Competition; Bout Rimes
IN COMPETITION NO 121, the annual bouts-rimes, you were asked for fourteen lines with specified rhymes. They came from Wordsworth's sonnet 'Hark! 'tis the Thrush, undaunted, undeprest'. I am not sure that if Words worth had sent in that sonnet for this competition he would have won a prize.
And, goodness me, what a lot of entries there were, and how good. Sus an Lewellyn's short tale included the lines, 'So he begged, in a bar, for a beer when a blast / From a bomb caused an angel to whisper, "Say, wilt / Thou come with me?'" Ginger Jelinek immediately caught attention with: 'While losing Mona left me undepressed / (as inconvenient as a shower of rain) / I knew I'd need another wife.'
That first rhyme 'undepressed' took many of you in a psychiatric direction. 'Deep in neurosis, what a cozy nest / a coffin seems,' said Gail White's narrator. Sarah WalYs heroine sees the winter through the half-empty glass of seasonal affective disorder, but in hot sun 'naked, dances where the snow once lay'.
'Lay' proved a stumbling block, though Basil Ransome-Davies's prescription was brisk: 'I'll settle for a brandy and a lay.' Bill Greenwell found the spot where the statue of an Ozymandias Blair once lay. For Frank McDonald, it was the aspirations of Gordon Brown that lay in ruins. Wordsworth himself had his thrush singing a lay, not a word I much care for even in verse, yet Philip Brown uses it in his poem on the skylark, which, in addition to the £25 that each of those printed below wins, secures the bonus prize of a Taylor's of Harrogate tea and cake set.
Behold! The tiny skylark, undepressed
By summer heat or wintry snow and rain,
Still sings on high its sweet melodious stran,
Instead of finding twigs to build its nest.
This idle bird, in part by nature blest,
Still twitters on, unbound by duty's chain:
No natural thoughts perplex its avian brain
Save flood and mating, song and evening rest.
The fledglings huddle close against the blast;
Their feathers droop, their slender bodies wilt.
They dread the rigours of each passing day
And long for nests that other birds have built.
Their lives are brief, their habitat the past:
The skylark, puzzled, chants a funeral lay.
Philip Brown
I've joined a bank. I'm undepressed
By failing wit or falling rain
As former fellow-rhymers strain
For feathers fit to line a nest
By cash and critics' kudos blest!
Thank God, I've lost that ball and chain,
From scansion's fetters freed my brain.
Let others write, my pen will rest
From odes whose flowers old rivals blast,
Or Muses, mocking, cause to wilt,
Deadlines that poison half the day
And literary castles never built!
With verse, dear ladies, in the past,
My bonus at your feet I lay.
Jerome Betts
Through the window you look undepressed,
while I stand out here soaked by the rain.
It seems you are hearing the strain
of a bird faraway in some nest.
Your eyes look beyond me. I'm blest
if I know what you're seeing. What chain
of wild thoughts are now plaguing my brain
as the rain hammers down without rest!
I have a compulsion to blast
a hole through your door. I shall wilt
out here in this storm. Yesterday
you were kinder. What is it that's built
up inside that you cannot get past,
a thing you won't let me allay?
Martin Elster
I'd lie, were I to say I'm undepressed.
OK, Into each life a little rain ...
but aphorisms never eased the strain
of living in an overcrowded nest,
when He who Rules the Roost is hardly blest
with TLC. The endless, weary chain
of wham, bamn, thanks for nothing, chicken-brain,
with all of us! He never lets us rest!
Had I the words, the strength of will, I'd blast
his cocksure manner, make his ego wilt, e
masculate the beast who, day by day,
pecks holes in any self-esteem I've built. B
ut what the hell. Chuck out the dreams, the past.
Leave me alone, I've got an egg to lay.
Joan Butler
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