No. 501: The winners
Trevor Grove reports: Competitors were asked to write an octet, using the given rhymes, on one of the following subjects : The Paris riots; Kingmaker King; a sewer-rat dreams of better things.
Riot-shy? Or simply hoping that the less said, the greater the chances that the old man will find the chie-en-/it too much for even his capacious nose? Whatever the reasons, few attempted an octet on the Paris riots. More popular as a subject was press baron Cecil and his ill-timed cri de coeur. whose only effect was to silence the softer voice of private discon- tent. The poem from which the rhymes were taken was "A Softer Voice,' by Elizabeth Bar- rett Browning. Though nobody wins the guinea for identifying it, R. Rochester gets five guineas for a cunning development of the theme :
Then had the King, men told in undertones, A mirror, strangely wrought wherein wild dreams Of intrigue, plot and treason, tottering thrones Might be revealed; and prophets came in streams To ask great Northcliffe's nephew which way forward If Jenkins—, Healey—, Stewart—, Peter Shoreward, They should incline . . .
. . . then brought the King the mirror to their door But none was wiser than he was before.
Both runners-up wrote about the dreaming rat. N. J. Rock wins three guineas : There's a white froth on the Weser as it wanders through my dreams With a half-forgotten piping like the music of sweet streams Of larding-fat and honey-comb with unctuous undertones
Of peach and Parmesan and pilchard—
banquets of our tribal thrones! And 'times I see our heroes, fat and fertile on its banks, Where open vat and oozy keg stand ranks on serried ranks . . .
While I go starving, hunted, poisoned bait laid at my door, I hear that gnawing tune a-piping, dream of things I knew before.
Yolande Pierre also gets three guineas : I hear them still, those piping undertones That spoke of summer sun, and grassy banks On either side of cool, unmuddied streams, And still the sound of running feet, like ranks Of soldiers, marches through my troubled dreams.
I longed to follow that sweet sound, before It passed, singing the while of goldeii thrones— But could not shift this foul, encrusted door.
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