[Jan D. Hodge]

A friend of mine occasionally creates challenges for me, such as writing an anagram sonnet [each line of which is an anagram of the title] a la David Shulman's (pretty awful) "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1936). It (and a fatuous critique of it by Douglas Hofstadter) can easily be Googled; mine, relatively more successful, though I make no great poetic claims for it, was published in WordWays. And Kevin McFadden's "It's Smut" in his collection Hardscrabble is a poem in which each of its 14 lines anagrams "I know it when I see it."

Prompted by John Whitworth's recent example in General Talk ("A form using bold"), I offer this more reasonable one posed by said friend. Those of the Cantor school will likely find it masturbatory, a mere exercise in filling in the blanks, but others might enjoy the technical challenge.

Write a follow-up to E. A. Robinson's "Richard Cory," in which his money is inherited by his brother, a Tibetan monk with a sense of humor. Each line in your response must begin and end with the same words as the corresponding line in "Richard Cory." He did not specify IP, though in my response I retained that form.