Dear Readers, it’s that time of year again, when small children keel over from chocolate overdose and tired parents make costumes out of tin foil and cardboard toilet roll centres because their little ones want to walk the street dressed as a robot. At least that was what used to happen in our house. Not that we had trick or treating in my day! Halloween involved, at the most, a ‘party’ where my peers gathered to scare the wits out of one another before retiring for a sleepless night at their own houses. Bonfire night was the big night, what with the baked potatoes and, in my house at least, the hotdogs. But more of that next week.

What I’d like you to do this week is peruse the lyrics below, and decide which creature they relate to. Some are from poems, and some are from songs. Extra points for the title of the aforesaid master/mistress work and for the artist/poet/author (so there are 30 points available in total). Several of the extracts below refer to the same animal, so be careful!

Answers in the comments by 5 p.m. UK time next Friday (5th November). The results and accolades will be posted next Saturday (6th November). I will disappear your answers as soon as I see them, but as usual if you are easily influenced write them down old school on a piece of paper first (though then you will need to rely on your own strength of will to avoid changing anything). I’m sure you are all made of stern stuff however, so you would never be tempted.

Let’s see how we do!

1.

Twinkle twinkle little XXXXX
How I wonder what you’re at
Up above the world so high
Like a tea tray in the sky

2.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

3.

Look, he’s crawling up my wall
Black and hairy, very small
Now he’s up above my head
Hanging by a little thread

4.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

5.

But when the day is done
And the sun goes down
And the moonlight’s shining through
Then like a sinner before the gates of Heaven
I’ll come crawling on back to you

6.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”

7.

She doesn’t give you time for questions
As she locks up your arm in hers
And you follow ’till your sense of which direction
Completely disappears
By the blue tiled walls near the market stalls
There’s a hidden door she leads you to
These days, she says, I feel my life
Just like a river running through
The year of the xxxxxx

8.

In touch with the ground
I’m on the hunt I’m after you
Smell like I sound, I’m lost in a crowd
And I’m hungry like the xxxxxx
Straddle the line in discord and rhyme
I’m on the hunt I’m after you
Mouth is alive, with juices like wine
And I’m hungry like the xxxxxx

9.

The itsy bitsy xxxxxxxxxx
Climbed up the waterspout
Down came the rain
And washed the xxxxxx out
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain
And the itsy bitsy xxxxxxxxxx
Climbed up the spout again

10.

His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen: