Listen With Others

Another new setter this week, although it’s not giving anything away to say that as I solved this puzzle I suspected we had a seasoned setter in a new guise. Some clashes to identify this week, plus some clues with extra words plus a lot of clues with extra letters plus two messages.

This was certainly a tricky solve for me. The extra words in clues hinting at thematic material were certainly diverse, if not bizarre. Little dogs and a couple of hands and some unusual first names: Lester, Fannie, Siegmund and Laetitia. Anyway, it all came together slowly but surely with some fun clues along the way. I could list a lot more, but these were probably my favourites:

The remaining extra words gave Latin names which I thought referred to the unusual names mentioned above but that would prove wrong.

The extra letters in clues gave End of four verses; novel title and those clues’ last letters instructed us to Shade area bound by theme red. Well that didn’t really help with identifying which Larkin poem was our theme. In the finished grid, COUNTESS and THE EARL in columns 3 and 11 came to the rescue with Google revealing An Arundel Tomb. Wiki gave us a nice photograph of this with the countess and earl hand-in-hand and the two dogs at their feet.

The last lines of the four verses which we needed were:

• The little dogs under their feet — PEKE & PUG in row 9
• His hand withdrawn, holding her hand — two hands overlapping in the top centre
• The Latin names around the base — TITUS & NERO (the latter over two lines)
• The endless altered people came — jumbles of FANNI(e), LAETITI(a) (top left) & SIEGMUN(d), LESTE(r) (top right)

Finally, a lot of colouring in produced a large heart to represent “What will survive of us is love.”

Fine grid and clues and great fun. Thanks, Banjaluka.