[John Whitworth]

Do not forget. The Faerie Queene is only half-finished. There were another 36,000 lines to come. Seriously, if you want to know what it is like then read The Second Book right through, a mere 6,000 lines and you can read them quickly.My tutor in Old English at Oxford, a Mr Rigg, said he read the whole thing sitting in a pub in Yorkshire for a fortnight and drinking large quantities of Yorkshire Ale. Philip Larkin read the whole thing too, though he hated it, but the he seems to have hated most of the English Literature he read. C. S.. Lewis read it all. I should think beer came into it with him as well.

Nice one Lance. You have actually contrived a poem. The rest of us can only manage verse. But does Lucy like poetry? The jury, as they say, is out.

[Rob Stuart]

‘Porterhouse Blue’ by Tom Sharpe

A zealous new Master
Is thought a disaster
By indolent dons
Who subsist upon swans.

[John Whitworth]

The Iliad

Paris, a Trojan Princeling, stole the wife
Of an important Greek, an act of thuggery.
That led to years and years of bloody strife
And Ilium’s topless towers being burned to buggery.


Holy Bible

It starts with dark and ends with revelation,
And in between there's lots about the Jews.
The stuff about JC is a sensation,
As for the rest, the moral's what you choose.

[Roger Slater]

Captain Ahab seeks the whale.
It's harder than he planned on.
From the start, he's bound to fail.
He lacks a leg to stand on.

**

David Copperfield faces the world,
meets many a scoundrel and blighter,
but also some nice folk, I'm happy to say,
and he ends up being a writer.

[Mary McLean]

Sense and Sensibility

Elinor and Marianne are toffs
till Father dies. The heir sends them away.
Marianne gets dumped, grows sad, and coughs,
but both the sisters find their HEA.

[ross hamilton hill]

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a book about his errant wife.
G and T was their tipple, they liked the Mediteranean ripple
and lived la vie in grand hotels. But fashion changes.
Zelda cracked! Scott kept writing, became a hack.

[Jerome Betts]

John, it's Tessa, God bless 'er

Alice, once through the looking-glass,
Becomes a living chess-girl
But not, whatever comes to pass,
A mere quiescent yes-girl

[Martin Parker]

Shakespeare's First Folio

The play's the thing
and several plays are even more so.
The history ones are riveting,
the comedies all tend to bore so.

[Roger Slater]

Scrooge is a greedy, grouchy miser.
Ghosts come. He turns kinder, wiser.
Now, instead of more abuse,
He gives Bob Cratchit a Christmas goose.

[John Whitworth]

The Faerie Queene

A gentle knight was pricking on the plain
And lots more knights were going pricking too.
For best results you disengage your brain
And let the pretty verse wash over you.