Competition No 3708

Set by John Crick on 19 November

We asked for keys to unlock well-known poems from the constraints of hackneyed interpretation.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Chas F Garvey began so brilliantly: "During his sexual depression, Betjeman strove to keep from his readership the source of his despair. However, it scarcely needed rocket science to deduce that for 'Slough' one should read 'Tring'." An hon mensh for that alone. Unfortunately, I thought it then rather tailed off. Most of the new interpretations involved something sexual or drug-related. More hon menshes to Anne Du Croz (Shelley's "To a Skylark" - really a hymn to acid), Simon Herbertson (Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night"- did you know that night is cockney rhyming slang for "night and day", ie, gay?), Gerard Benson (Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" - daffodil preceded pansy as the floral sobriquet for a gay man), Ian Birchall (T S Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" - in the Missouri dialect, "turn" refers to the Sin of Onan) and David Silverman (Wordsworth's "Upon Westminster Bridge" - which is on the way to both Hampstead Heath and Clapham Common, depending on your direction). £20 to the winners; the vouchers go to G M Davis.

Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners" is a challengingly enigmatic poem. Once one realises, however, that the poet is using "Traveller" as a synonym for pedlar it becomes obvious that the man is trading in "horse" or heroin, along with "grass" or cannabis, the two words neatly placed within the one line: "And his horse in the silence champed the grasses".

Instantly, other pieces of the jigsaw fall into place. The "bird" that flutters with such powerful symbolism over the Traveller's head - reminding us of its literary antecedents: Coleridge's albatross and Poe's raven - is the threat of imprisonment that hovers constantly over the dealer.

The narcotic stupor of the listeners has turned them into phantom-like figures. "Tell them I came and no one answered, that I kept my word," the man cries desperately before leaving with the "horse" or heroin, cryptically alluded to by "plunging hoofs".

De la Mare, an anagram of "dear male", is obviously a false name. My theory is that the publication of the poem served as a coded message, advertising drugs that could not be delivered to their original destination. The poet was cunningly attempting to flog his dead "horse".

Maureen Sandler

Though veiled by the inhibitions and ellipses of early Victorian poetic expression, the true subject of "Dover Beach" - post-orgasmic tristesse - tells us more about Matthew Arnold's personal concerns than its surface tone of metaphysical angst and doubt commonly suggests. Submerged in what Thomas Hardy called "the ache of modernism" are more intimate personal confessions.

Priding himself on a profuse ejaculation ("Come to the window . . . the long line of spray"), the lonely author masturbates while apostrophising an imaginary female companion. He has resolutely spurned the foreign brothel whose red light winks briefly from across the Channel, but its very appearance has aroused him and kept him from sleep. However, the solitary act leaves him downcast and ashamed - drained and depleted like the "withdrawing" Sea of Faith.

Finally, he records the ultimate falsity of the utopian visions ("land of dreams") promised by autoerotic practices, yet without offering a hopeful alternative, so it seems that the "clash by night" of guilty hand and turbid penis will be regularly repeated. As in "The Progress of Poesy" ("the sacred drops/Ran off and vanished out of hand"), Arnold's addiction to self-abuse imprisons him in a volatile state of warring emotions.

G M Davis

Anyone who has asked him/herself why Coleridge's Ancient Mariner chose as his unwilling listener a Wedding Guest will be enlightened by a new interpretation by Professor Clumphorn. The professor has incontrovertible evidence that an albatross was, to Coleridge and others, an emblem of female fertility. The Ancient Mariner, under this post-structuralist interpretation, becomes a figure hostile to procreation, and the Wedding Guest is, by metonymy, a potential provider of fecundity. The bassoon, which distresses him as he is held captive, is obviously phallic, and the description of the bride as "red as a rose" needs no further explanation to those familiar with the medieval symbolic associations of this flower. The sailors who fed the bird - in the hope, according to the professor, of their wives becoming pregnant on their return - punished the slayer of the creature by tying it round his neck: Freudian resonances connecting the neck with the penis abound here, as they do when the Ancient Mariner redeems himself by blessing the water-snakes, clearly representative of spermatozoa. Life-in-death is deconstructed as sterility and, as the dominant opposing trope, Professor Clumphorn draws particular attention to the Hermit's "cushion plump" as a visual icon of the maternal belly.

Barbara Daniels

No 3711 Set by Leonora Casement

An oldie. Take the following words and turn them into a reasonable piece of writing: carbuncle, Alastair, diva, manicure, limerick, erysipelas, hostess, cappuccino, laissez-faire, twins, vouchsafe, trolley and Beretta.

Max 200 words to be in by 3 January (to appear in issue dated 14 January) E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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