Even an almost decomposed spineless Penguin can squawk, as it were, a deathbed message. An example comes from Beyond The Headlines, a 1941 collection of 1930s News Chronicle pieces by ‘Timothy Shy’ (D.B. Wyndham Lewis). In an item called Pegasus Hobbled about Oxford’s Newdigate prize being won by a poem on Milton in blank and free verse he claims “ a university poet we know had hoped to catch the examiner’s eye with a fine, if sombre, rhymed opening:
Sing, melancholy Muse, of England and of Milton,
One being dead and gone, the other largely built on . . . “
If it was like that in the 1930s in the age of ribbon development and pylons what would he have made of today’s sprawling housing estates, motorways and other ways, suburbia, subtopia and Things in Fields?
You are invited to comment on such matters in England or elsewhere some eighty years on in up to 16 lines by February the 23rd either by taking up Shy’s strain or striking out on your own
Rose-breasted grosbeak calling here,
Though not the usual time of year.
I, hero of Faith Thompson's piece,
Announce this issue's due to cease,
But March the 1st, wind, rain or snow,
Will see our eighteenth vernal show
With wit and mirth galore in slots
Untainted by inhuman bots.