Just after Christmas 2022, and when the big retail outlets had reprised their rather inappropriate custom of putting Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and other Easter goodies out on their shelves, I decided to try my hand at setting a Listener Crossword to appear in early April 2023 — and when Creme Eggs really should continue to be on sale, which they generally are not.
As appears to be a generational character flaw in my family, I had failed to read properly the instructions for prospective setters and, for some reason, I thought that a lead time of 3 months was what the vetters required. In much the same way that my father’s self-assembled aluminium and glass greenhouse kit didn’t turn out to be quite square in places (thus allowing more access than recommended to the elements) and was eventually flattened by a storm, my first completed attempt at a Listener towards the end of January thus arrived far too late to be considered for publication at Easter 2023 as I had hoped.
“Some Conceit” is a title that has apparently baffled a number of solvers, and this is perhaps understandable since it was Samuel Johnson who disliked the ‘conceits’ used by metaphysical poets, complaining that their poetry “stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear”. He went on to write that: “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons and allusions: their learning instructs and their subtlety surprises: but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased. […] Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost: if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth: if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage.”
I cannot recall exactly how the idea of cramming lines of poetry into the shape of a cross came to me: but, as a singer for most of my life, I have often performed George Herbert’s “Easter” (which Shirley Curran of Chalicea fame tells me was originally called “Easter- wings”), set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams; so I had the lyrics and the shape was pertinent to them. With hindsight, perhaps the horizontal beam might have been a row higher, but I had done most of the spadework by the time that that became obvious; and the word ‘LORD’ appeared in the right place to help solvers puzzled by the endgame, so I left it where it was.
The difficulty as I remember it, was sorting out columns 5 to 8 so that the jumbled words worked and the shortened rows contained the right letters if not necessarily in the right order (as Eric Morecambe once said). I also needed to be sure that there were very few unches in the middle square of 16 letters where the down entries intersected those across to create a centre of uncertainty. Finally, more by luck than good planning, all three four-letter words that populated the vertical part of the cross remained intact so that solvers could be sure that they had the right lines of the poem — albeit in its original published form.
Among the clues that I particularly liked, the identification of SHINING as STEPHEN KING IS minus KEEPS (with T as the extra letter) was pleasing; and I hoped that the reference to Holyrood in a Scottish clue would also serve as a cryptic pointer to the puzzle’s shape and theme.
So, while the first of my published efforts was “No Time To Die” (#4791) last November, “Some Conceit” was the first that I completed and submitted: and the cause for a second time of great pleasure — while recognising how privileged I am — to see it in print.
As ever, my thanks go to Roger, Shane and John (the triumvirate of titans), and my brother, Richard, for solving the prototype which required some adjustment in accordance with his helpful comments.
Vainglorious
18th April 2024
Listen With Others 