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Competition No 3700

We asked for meaningful verse made up of lines from well-known poems.

Oh, the letters that have poured in, pointing out our error in claiming that this comp was last set in 1976. Not so, you cried. We even had a letter reminiscing about the time it was set back in the 1930s. You loyal darlings. Ian Birchall sent in two entries, pointing out (so honest!) that he had previously sent them in but they had failed. He was clearly hoping that standards would be so much lower this time around that one might make it. Hmmm . . . oh, all right, then. Hon menshes to Anne Du Croz, Sid Field, A Gannell (I hope this is correct) and Robin Oakley-Hill. £20 to the winners. The vouchers go to Will Bellenger.

No use to talk to me -

You know that I should strangle you:

Or - almost worse, if worse can be -

What's become of me or you?

But why do I talk of Death?

Such goings-on could not be so,

And sweeter woman ne'er drew breath.

I will not let thee go.

And this is love, as I hear tell,

In pairs, on every bed.

I only feel - Farewell! Farewell!

I would that I were dead!

Let me not love thee, if I love thee not:

Say nay, say nay, for shame;

Here am I sweating, sick and hot,

And I have forgotten your name.

Will Bellenger

(A E Housman, William Morris, Alice Meynell, Sir William Empson, Thomas Hood, Betjeman, Jean Ingelow, Robert Bridges, Sir Walter Raleigh, Auden, Byron, Tennyson, A P Herbert, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Rupert Brooke, Swinburne)

Midwinter spring is its own season,

The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly,

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars

Inside my eye, outside my eye, yet free

Here, where the world is quiet.

A far sea moves in my ear,

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had.

Noises at dawn will bring

A heavy body and a heavy heart

And all we need of hell.

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

Basil Ransome-Davies

(T S Eliot, Louis Macneice, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, Robert Lowell, Swinburne, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti, Auden, Edward Thomas, Emily Dickinson, Yeats)

Far I hear the steady drummer,

Ancestral voices prophesying war.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Lest we forget - lest we forget,

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see.

I heard a voice within the tavern cry,

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori".

But when the days of golden dreams had perished

What passing bells for those who die as cattle?

Do you hear the children weeping, oh my brothers?

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

I think it better that in times like these

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Tears from the depths of some divine despair

Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves -

Better by far you should forget and smile

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Sara Williams

(A E Housman, Coleridge, Byron, Shakespeare, Kipling, Edward FitzGerald, Shakespeare, Wilfred Owen, Emily Bronte, Wilfred Owen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson)

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring;

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

Willing to wickedness, in spite of years,

Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold!

O! What a mansion have those vices got;

I think there's a moral, though I don't know what.

A fool might once himself alone expose;

Shades of the prison-house begin to close.

Kill me outright with looks, and rid my pain

Because I cannot hope to turn again.

Ian Birchall

(T S Eliot, Yeats, Daniel Defoe, Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Shakespeare, A A Milne, Alexander Pope, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, T S Eliot)

No 3703 Set by Margaret Rogers

So, French schools are to use EastEnders to help their pupils learn English. We want you to send in well-known excerpts from famous French novels (eg, La Peste, Nausea, A la recherche du temps perdu) translated by students exposed to this soap. (For those non-French speakers, please use your existing English translations.)

To be in by 25 October

(to appear in issue dated 5 November) E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk