COMPETITION

No. 602: Self-praise

Set by Joyce Johnson: 'Scorn not the sonnet' wrote Wordsworth, and proceeded to laud it in sonnet form. Competitors are invited to contribute to the bicentenary of the poet's birth by imitating his idea and composing a triolet, rondel, rondeau, clerihew or limerick in praise or criticism of the form used. Entries, marked 'Competition No. 602', by 8 May.

No. 599: The winners

Trevor Grove reports: With pollution and concern for the environment very much in- topics this year, E. 0. Parrott suggested that

competitors might care to provide an ode or sonnet to conservation or to update some well-known poem concerned with the beauty of the environment. And provide them they certainly did: a perfect mountain of entries.

so that what with this abundance of pleas passionate and sonnets satirical I confess to a certain access of lottery-mindedness when

it came to adjudicating. There were only two actual odes to Mistress Conservation, one of them, particularly heartfelt, from Edwin Peeke. All the other entries seemed more concerned with documentation rather than prevention, as was Captain Rochester's de- scription of current troubles on the Exe:

The sweet, solacious, succulent, incredible In size and flavour, oysters long are gone; The scallops too. A few diseased inedible Cockles and puny mussels linger on.

The fisherfolk who knew the bulging net Now grant one salmon is enough to please And hold that silver leaper dearer yet When not, for once, half eaten by disease ...

Meantime, prizewise, three guineas to each of the following: A thing of plastic is a plague for ever: Its ugliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep Its form and colour on the rubbish heap. Under old trees, sprinkling the forest brake,

Caught by a willow trail upon the lake.

It is so durable, we should be grieving Therefore; on every morrow, are we leaving

Some shape of plastic on the encumbered

earth.

Will future generations gauge our worth, Our value judgments, qualities of mind, By all these light, tough goods we leave

behind?

And make their own assessment of our scene

Up to their knees in polypropylene?

Gwen Foyle

'From you have I been absent in the Spring, When monoxide April dressed in all his grime. Hath put a sulphurous smog in every thing, That heavy chlorine laughed and leapt in slime.

Yet not the deaths of birds, nor the dank smell, Of poisoned flowers in odours and in hue, Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their scrap heap pluck them where they stew, Nor did I wonder at the lily's plight, Nor praise the deep ruddy lead in the rose.

I hey were but dead, but figures of the blight, Drawn after hell, the pattern of all those! Yet seemed it winter still, and you away, And with this effluent I cannot stay.

Bruce Boyle

There is green stagnance here that thicker lies Than mato grosso in remote Brazil; Awaiting heat to swarm endemic flies Matching the serpent in their power to kill. Stagnance that grimlier on the spirit lies Than choked nostrils under choked eyes; Stagnance that reigns supreme under our

English skies.

Here are dead kittens cheap, And round the cats the pondsnails creep, And from the stream old iron bedsteads peep, And plastic bags turn lock to cess-pit

deep 3 3

Let us swear an oath and keep it with an equal mind, These our Inland Waterways to love and leave refined, Making them, like gods together, worthy of mankind. N.1. Rock My head aches and a throbbing motion sears My sense as though of fluoride I had drunk, Or filtered heavy water through my ears One minute past and Heathrow-wards had sunk; Tis not through envy of thine ample sound, But being too ample in its ampleness, When thou, vast-winged Dryad of the air, 'Bove some developed ground Of tow'ring flats and pylons numberless, Warnest of Progress made without a care.

D. Gillmore Heidenriislein (from the German)

Saw a knave a little rose white little rose in the heather was so young and morning-bright ran he quick to see the sight little rose in the heather.

Little rose, little rose, little rose white. Little rose in the heather!

Spoke the knave: 'I pick you up!'

Little rose in the heather.' Spoke the rose: 'Myopic pup! I'm a little white paper cup.' Paper cup in the heather.

Paper cup. paper cup, paper cup white Paper cup in the heather.

Cole Hawlings

A cordial welcome to all those who entered the competition for the first time, and a final thought from Malcolm Downing; `La belle clsoan sans merci': 0 what can ail thee nightingale,

Alone and hoarsely twittering?

The lake is full of cyanide,

So what the hell's there to sing about?