‘Putting the World to Rights’ by Charybdis
Posted by Encota on 10 Aug 2018
I think this excellent puzzle from Charybdis let me set my personal record for the number of copies of the grid I needed to complete it – in all I used five. Two I binned but the other three feature here.
Early on the jumbling meant that many cells had multiple options in them during the earlier phase of solving. Here’s an example where I had made some progress …
Finally, once all clues are solved, I make it 21 cells that are unchecked by down clues – marked in green in the attached.
- 4 are already identified
- 6 more are identified by adding MERE ANARCHY from the poem, at 1d
- and the remaining 11 are found from the (inferred) requirement for all final words in the grid to be real words, each one using one of the options in the green cells above. Why the inference, you may ask? Well, I couldn’t see any reason for 17ac to explain that GAND is a word, the French version of the place-name Ghent, unless all Across entries are words. Am I missing something?
And finally it looked something like this rough copy:
A bit more background. It’s all based on W B Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”
The instructions to change cells in the centre turned CENTRE into The falcon = GENTLE
And the phrase to be higlighted with a smooth curve, from the poem, was:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre”
Aside: haven’t we seen GENTLE in another 2018 Listener (or did I dream it)?
25d includes a nice hint with ‘Gyring bird …”
In 24d I’d initially picked the wrong word to delete, resulting in ROUGH BEAST WAY NO HEART
Messages:
- UNJUMBLE ALL DOWN ENTRIES, and
- ROUGH BEAST WHY NO HEART, …
- … the second of these might be parsed as {BEAST W(h)Y}*, resulting in the poet W B YEATS
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charybdis said
Thanks, Encota