No. 478: The winners
Competitors were asked to compose a sextet on one of the following subjects : Barbara Castle, drugs, Last Exit to Brooklyn, the love song of a lonely computer.
Computers, it seems, are by no means un- romantic. Mechanical they may be, even rude (most competitors agreed there was no such thing as pure science), but they have a highly developed sense of decorum and a Shake- spearian range of sentiment. This is hardly surprising. Considering they have for some time been making clandestine approaches to Grub Street and Tin Pan Alley, the assault on Parnassus was bound to come. No one, apparently, attempted composition under the influence of drugs, though Dr Sadler did the next best thing in adopting the persona of S. T. Coleridge:
0 Wedding Guest, this soul's had dreams Not known to mortal brain, When mescalin, like God's light beams, Brought visions in its train.
There is no doubt that on intrinsic merit A. W. Ewart James's entry deserves first prize. Unfortunately, his reply to Mr Leonard Cottrell's letter (SPECTATOR 8 December) is hardly subsumed under any of the subject- headings set, even granted that alcohol and fast cars are drugs :
It appears that Leonard Cottrell would replace his earthly joys With the thrill of plastic sceneries and hypodermic toys.
He's 'hung' on speed and alcohol—a choice confronts his brain: He can either go to Mexico, or learn to drive a train.
But 'tis better if he hang himself from off his Cotswold beams, And see the light which formulates his plastic hippie dreams.
The first prize of five guineas goes, instead, to a computer, brain-child of Philip Glassborow :
I sit here humming gently, while immersed in lovelorn dreams, Poetically bombarding my inside with cathode beams; Her finery in binary I type with yearning joys, Dismissing moon-ships, rocket-probes, and other such, as toys; And though punched tape's my medium, my poetry is pure, Ecstatically describing my programmer demure.
And three guineas to G. A. St George, whose 'stern dispenser' might become Milton's God as well as it does Mrs Castle: Fair arbiter of lorry, bus and train, Must I for thee renounce all ton-up dreams— Feel guilty 'neath the local's oaken beams— And view all cars as homicidal toys? 0 stern dispenser of restricted joys, Laws sometimes too reflect a fuddled brain.
A special mention for Nancy Perry's 'Cautionary Tale' and a one guinea prize to Charles Lyall for identifying the ryhmes from Milton's II Penseroso.
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