Alison Chisholm is delighted by the inventive ways the winners of WM’s Cautionary Tales competition show people getting their comeuppance in rhyme
Cautionary Tales begin with the premise that someone, usually a child, displays elements of bad behaviour and comes to a sticky end because of them. In the tradition of Hilaire Belloc, whose tales have amused readers for over a century, poets were invited to create their own horrible brats and devise an appropriate comeuppance. Obnoxious adults were also welcomed.
Imagination poured by the bucketful. Revolting characters with nasty habits got their just deserts, anything from a reprimand to a premature demise. We had new inventions among the characters, and a few old friends, including Macbeth. Most of the entries had the appropriate quota of humour, and there were poems to make the reader laugh aloud and darker pieces with a more sardonic tone eliciting a wry smile.
Most of the entries followed the Belloc pattern of rhyme and metre, and these were undoubtedly the strongest of the poems submitted. The successful pieces adopted a conversational tone, and used language fluently and grammatically.
Unfortunately a number of potentially excellent poems missed out by failing to offer that basic requirement, the well structured, grammatical sentence, through most if not all of the text. This is especially important in a narrative poem. Although there are a few occasions when an unpunctuated poem works, these are the exceptions. Precision of sentence structuring signposts to the reader that this is a carefully crafted piece that has been developed and refined.
Two other elements presented avoidable problems. One is the simple matter of following the competition requirements in terms of length, poetic style and subject matter. The other is just a little more complex. Whenever a competition has a line limit, it’s important to balance the material of the contents within the maximum number of lines. If you know you can include – say – ten stanzas, don’t devote six of them to scene setting. Tighten that introduction to one or two stanzas, and you have a lot more scope to develop your ideas through the rest of the poem, and will not have to rush the ending.
The winning poem, The Downfall of a Big-Head, by Melanie Francis of Harrow, Middlesex, introduces Joe and his foibles in the first stanza, explores the consequences in the next five, and the final stanza and last line of the penultimate describe the result. This could come as a shock – but there h
