SPECTATOR COMPETITION No. zoo

Report by Marghanita Laski

A prize was offered for potentially immortal quotations of not more than one and a half lines in length, together with the name of the original work in which the quotation would have appeared if it had ever got written.

Posterity, for the purposes of this century competition, turned out to be three wiseacres and a week, but there was no disagreement on either aims or result. We were prepared to admit anything, so long as it had the one quality of being a potentially memorable quotation —Nice Noises (" Don John of Austria. . ."), exciting use of proper names (" 0 Pythagoras Metempsychosis ! "), the sort of badness one would give anything to forget but can't (" Meet we no angels, Pansie ? ''), Homely wisdom C' Today is • the tomorrow. ..

Effective Skit, Mnemonics, Pastiche, Wit, Noble Thoughts or Beauty. Most competitors tried the last three categories, and here most of the best and worst were found.

Though Guy Innes complained of the sesquipedalian limit set, it is astonishing how many competitors found one and a half lines too much for their talents and would have been nearer success if they'd cut their entries to a single line or less. Thus, R. Tuck Pook with . where maidens dream and weep For love too sharp for joy, too fierce for sleep" (" Pctrella in Purgatory ") in which the first half-line is too weak for the full one. Similarly, Frank Dunnill in " Satire Upon A Certain Sex" ". . of stark extremes contrived, Wanton or wan ; if not depraved, deprived " where the last four words are the memorable ones. Kenneth S. Kitchun has a good first but poor second line in " We who love lightning but detest the thunder Must have our minds amended " (" Korea ").

No Mnemonics, alas. A. H. Cooper had a shot at Nice Noises With " The silky soft susurrus of a soughing summer sigh " from " Arcadian Days," and there was a rumbustious entry from Arthur Oliver's "The New Hudibras " : " .... holy and bold The Bishop stood up, for he knew that a lie must be told. " One might imagine it being quoted at a dinner of Disestablishmentarians, but it isn't quite sharp enough. Only H. A. C. Evans made any use of beautiful names with " .... Now fades the dying voice Of Orpheus mourning for Eurydice " (" Dead Love ").

Over the bad-but-not-sufficiently-memorable it is kinder to draw a veil, though not, I think, over C. P. Driver's" And don't you pop the question till Mama has seen the girl "' (19th Century Popular Song), the only entry in the Tararaboomdeay tradition. There was any amount of folksy wit for wayside pulpits or end-of-term speeches, like Mrs. Charlesworth's ". . Not regeneration by suffering But regeneration by achievement " (" Victories "), T. E. Caton's " Error thus was ever made In ever chiding error " (" Family Training" from Poems of Hearth and Home) and J. A. C. Morrison's ".... in the School of Life, Ana bottom of-the Class " (" Lines written in dejection at Chalford "), a natural for self-made politicians reminiscing at public schools. Mrs. V. R. Orrnerod sent a pleasing extract from " My Pussy," a poem written at the age of eight, ". . .. although he is affectionate, He has been known to bite," which might have a modest future as a quote in certain families.

Among the pastiches we liked the Rev. J. R. Dewing's " Affliction weep's; But Faith restrains the tear " ("For a memorial in Stone or Brass"), but felt it was more likely to be copied with pleasure off an

old grave than taken into use today. The same objection invalidated C. P. Driver's "The dust triumphant will arise again And choke their speech. . ." (" Helen of Troy"); his putative Thomas Scovell (1588-1643) might have been remembered for it, but Mr. Driver won't. R. Tuck Pook spoilt her promising quotation from " The Desired "—". . so does her love outpour That she's at once wife, mother, friend and paramour "—by avoiding the obvious rhyme, though many may disagree. The titles tended to be longer than the quotes, and R. M. Anthony's " Pessimism ; or the Whole Meaning of Life on Earth Expounded ; a Dialectical Tone Poem" was barely exceptional. Had this been a title competition, the prize would certainly have gone to Graeme Wilson for" My True Love hath my Heart and I have Yaws," with an hon. men. for" Kakistrocracy : or Twelve Good Men and Truman."

Beauty' and Noble Thoughts were the hardest to judge, because there were so many echoes. Allan M. Laing's entry, for instance, was so unmistakably a Famous Quotation that one couldn't help unjustly assuming that it had become one long ago. R. T. B. took me to task for expecting great quotations without great poets, but, while admitting cautiously that there's something in what he says, I must confound him with the line that gave me the idea for this competition, Dean Burgin's " A rose-red city, half as old as time."

Two first prizes of two guineas each go to Guy lanes, for lines we can imagine any politician using, confident of recognition and -response, and to P. A. T. O'Donnell for a quotation that is really an anthology piece as it stands. A prize of one guinea to R. T. B. for the most memorable among innumerable similes, and honourable mentions for the rest printed below.

FIRST PRIZES

(GUY 1NNES)

"When shall your flag fly, and I not hail it, Reading the signal from " Comrades "

(P. A. T. O'DONNELL) " Your arm, kind stranger ! I am out of breath.'

'I know,' said Death from "The New Everyman"

SECOND PRIZE (R. T. B.)

"Her beauty, like a breaking branch of snow." from "La Lointaine Princesse"

HONOURABLE MENTIONS (ALLAN M. LAING)

and on his face The last faint glory of a dying race."

from the heroic poem -Umslopogaas: or The Last of the Zulus " •

(R. KENNARD DAVIS)

Si puo fumare, • Eppur è view° di sputare."

Dante, to his critics in Hell, from an Unwritten Canto of the "Inferno " (Miss A. M. WALMSLEY)

And over painted window-sills Familiar outlines of the Malvern Hills." from "Pastoral "

(WILLY TADPOLE)

"Smooth as a wave that brings

The wandering swans 41

from "Songs of Night and Dawn"

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