[John Whitworth]

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.

[Gail White]

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.

[John Whitworth]

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.

[George Simmers]

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

[Roger Slater]

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

[Jerome Betts]

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!