Poetry Quiz

Portsmouth Poetry Society's December meeting was thus its seasonal event this evening, the quiz provided by me.

The Acrostic Sonnet puzzle was considered 'advanced' and so it was the first lines we did. Have a go yourselves now, if you fancy it. Answers to follow later, or available on application.

An Acrostic Sonnet

The fifteen crossword-style clues represent the title and fourteen lines, in two stanzas, of a sonnet. The first letters of each answer will then reveal a further poet.

He’s in toilets getting changed but not initially. ( 5 )

We loll about, Robert.  ( 6 )

Visually descriptive or figurative language. ( 7 )

‘Ha ha in Zep’, he could say, differently. ( 9 )

Consonants concentrated consecutively, that’s it! (12)

He and she are in the gravy. ( 8 )

Her first name would sit well with her second. ( 5 )

Two Welshmen and an Englishman, one of them in a pub. ( 6 )

He recollected azure heights. ( 7 )

 

Lord, he’s in Be My Baby, Ronettes. ( 5 )

Poem by Kipling, conditionally. ( 2 )

He uses pens erratically and is hiding somewhere there. (7)

Carpe diem was his advice. ( 6 )

Autumn, melancholy and a nightingale provided Keats with them. ( 4 )

She sounds like she has airs, if not Grace’s ( 3 )

Famous Opening Lines

Fill in the missing word and name the poet

1. Whan that ------ with his shoures soote

2. Of Man's First Disobedience, and the -----

3. Morning and evening

    Maids heard the ------- cry:

    “Come buy our orchard fruits,

    Come buy, come buy:

    4. Next to my own skin, her ------. My mistress

        bids me wear them, warm them, until evening   

    5. When I am an old woman I shall wear ------

    6. ----- has not any thing to show more fair:

    7.  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by -------

    8.  Nobody heard him, the dead man,  

         But still he lay moaning:

         I was much further out than you thought  

         And not ------ but drowning.

    9.  How do I love thee? Let me count the ----.

   10. Had we but world enough and ----