Dilly's Pentelopes

I first discovered Dilly and his 'pentelopes' while reading The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald (first published by Macmillan in 1977). Alfred Dillwyn ('Dilly') Knox was one of the four brothers featured in her biography of her father and three uncles. He was a classics scholar at King's College Cambridge and later a cryptographer in the First and Second World Wars. Amongst his wide range of interests were word-puzzles, poetry and... the 'pentelope'.

The rules for writing a pentelope are simple to understand but devilishly difficult to translate into practice. There must be five lines; each line must end with a word of the same kind but with a different vowel in the last syllable. The vowels, moreover, must be in alphabetical order: ie, a e i o u (or their phonetic equivalent). The word 'pentelope' may be based on three Greek roots meaning 'five', 'end' and 'voiced'.

Here is an example from Dilly's own pen:

Just look at my father
And mother together!
I fancy that neither
Would very much bother
If rid of the other.

Here is another, written as an epitaph on the very morning of AE Housman's death in 1936.

Sad though the news, how sad
Of thee, the poet, dead!
But still thy poems abide - 
There Death, the unsparing god
Himself dare not intrude.

The third example represents the feverish, flurrying fruit of my own effort:

He'd really be blind as a bat
Who was ready to aid and abet
Those who laud each liturgical split
So assisting thereby Satan's plot
To poison the Church at her root.

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