Competition

No. 1071: Marriage lines

Set by A.J. Wyborn: Contributions, please, of about 120 words to a book on Successful Marriage from well-known husbands in literature, the advice given to be from their own experience and observation. Entries to 'Competition No. 1071' by 16 July.

No. 1068: The winners

Charles Seaton reports: 'Leave to Robert Browning/Beggars, fleas and vines:/Leave to squeamish Ruskin/Popish Apennines,/Dirty stones of Venice/And his gaslamps seven ;/We've the stones of Snowdon/ And the lamps of Heaven' wrote Charles Kingsley. Competitors were asked for verses denigrating two authors of their choice and ending with some smug comparisons in similar vein to Kingsley's. Given the chance to decry their least favoured authors, competitors came out in some strength against T.S. Eliot among the more modern (with Betjeman and Chesterton following at a respectable distance) and less definitely against Keats (together with Gray and Wordsworth) from the past. The more forceful objectors, though not to any of these pet hates, included Tim O'Dowda:

Leave to Harold Pinter Dialogue elliptic In settings fraught with menace — Meaning wholly cryptic.

Leave to luckless Genet Tales of penal thuggery, Mixed for light relief With bouts of joyless buggery.

Let me browse on annals By doom and gloom unblotted, Where every 't' is crossed And every 'V is dotted.

Leave me gently grazing On Barchester or Blandings, Where flights of lovers' fancy All have Happy Landings.

and Robert Baird (who added a tribute to the increasingly repandu Roger Woddis):

Let the Martians have Craig Raine, They are welcome to him.

My fundament is racked with pain Through trying to construe him.

Let them have Ted Hughes as well, Angst and anguish seeker, Mars may be as bleak as hell Ted will make it bleaker.

We have men who rhyme and scan.

Skies of Mars may darken We have Woddis, Betjeman And also Philip Larkin.

Tiresias, who followed Kingsley in denigrating the cacophonious Browning, resurrected a noted blunder from the end of Pip pa Passes:

Leave to William Makepeace Snobs and prigs and bores, Clots and clowns and climbers Coachborne through the wars, While the roguish author Digs you in the ribs;

Leave to quirky Browning Names like G1GADIBS,

Sound and sense and scansion Twisted into knots, Priests and popes and painters, Owls and cowls and twats; Leave those foreign liquors, Quaff our British ales; Stride with sturdy Borrow Through the hills of Wales .. .

— While 0. Smith favoured more modern Memory aids than Wordsworth had:

Leave to Matthew Arnold Rugby and its Head, Let his scholar gipsy Rest among the dead; Classical allusions Give us all the pip, We've gone Comprehensive, Down with scholarship!

Leave to William Wordsworth Memories of hills, Trees and lakes and cuckoos, Hosts of daffodils; We've no recollections Tranquilly enjoyed, We've a tape recorder And a Polaroid.

Kingsley's verse form proved highly attractive to entrants — I was tempted to say .fatally' after reading them in bulk — hence ts high incidence among the prizewinners. Four pounds each to Tim O'Dowda, Barney Blackley and 0. Smith, and three pounds each to the others printed.

Eliot exalts the common, Penetrates the everyday Surface of the world around us

With his visionary ray.

Jolly Betjeman assures us That the way things were was best: Church and charm and cash are allies Guarding the well-feathered nest.

So the drab and the familiar Settle like a film of dust Over noble aspiration, Joie de vivre and Wanderlust.

Let old Eliot keep his wasteland, Betjeman his cosy fun, You and I have life before us, Youth and beauty, sea and sun.

(Barney Blackley) Let young John Keats hear nightingales And drink his Hippocrene, Let Morphean vapours fill the urn That Greece has never seen.

Send Byron on his pilgrimage To keep forever roving, The Isles of Greece may give him joy — Though Lucifer's for loving!

We need no help from pampered bards Who write such trivial bosh, We've ospreys in our Highland glens And pots by Mackintosh. Keats' beaded bubbles we deplore And Isles beyond the law —

The HEBRIDES are ever 01.11'S

And Heaven-sent usquebaugh.

(Dromore)