We arrived at a heavily landscaped corner, our lights cutting through the darkness. At previous clue sites, we'd easily spotted the clues, thanks to all of the other teams clustered around. But now it was after 10, and no-one was around. Team Fishstick Mess fanned out to search the corner. It took a while to find the envelope of clues in the dark. I enjoyed this part. It was fun hunting around. And it was easy to ignore the dreary sameness of the business park when concentrating on such a small part of it.
David found the envelope, and soon we were looking at a strange poem. To find the twist, we should lay down the overlay... Who had the overlay? We all searched through our papers. No-one had the overlay. We'd probably laid it down on some grass in the dark at the last clue site, and then overlooked it. So far, we'd lost a wedge of letters and a transparency. We were the littering-est team ever.
Alexandra phoned Wei-Hwa to ask what we'd see if we had the overlay. He wasn't sure he'd get it right, so he told us a numbered map location where we could find some overlays. It was right next to where we'd picked up our original overlay, so we quickly figured out that he'd got the location wrong. And when we went to the place where we picked up our original overlay, there was a sign telling us that someone had moved the overlays--to the place Wei-Hwa had pointed us to. Wei-Hwa had been a step ahead of us the whole way.
We ran back, and there was another enjoyable interlude of searching for an envelope at a dark intersection. When I found the envelope, for a second I considered not mentioning it, savoring this time of methodical search. But I snapped out of it and waved the team over.
Now we had the complete puzzle.
Remorse For Intemperate Speech
Wm. Butler YeatsRemorse-- is Memory--awake
Emily DickinsonRemorse-- is Memory-- awake--
I ranted to the knave and fool,
Her Parties all astir--
But outgrew that school,Would transform the part,
A Presence of Departed Acts--
Fit audience found, but cannot rule
My fanatic heart.At window-- and at Door--
Its Past-- set down before the Soul
And lighted with a Match--Perusal-- to facilitate--
I sought my betters: though in each
And help Belief to stretch--
Fine manners, liberal speech,Remorse is cureless--the Disease
Turn hatred into sport,
Not even God-- can heal--Nothing said or done can reach
For 'tis His institution-- and
The Adequate of Hell--My fanatic heart.
Out of Ireland have we come.Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's wombA fanatic heart.
Somehow, we had to get morse code out of this beast. I focused on the seemingly gratuitous punctuation in the poem. I should not have.
We concentrated on many things. I kept working on the punctuation, though it consistently led nowhere. Other folks looked at line lengths, on which poet had written which part, and stranger things.
At about the time I was giving up on punctuation, Alexandra was figuring that each line might map to a dot or dash. In that case, our target word was nine letters long, and ended in E or T. She and David still had other ideas to solve the puzzle by regular means, but I grabbed the game board and started scanning the words.
I should have told my teammates what I was doing, because then Alexandra wouldn't have grabbed the game board a few minutes later and turned it around. I immediately lost track of which parts I'd already searched. She and David had given up on other ways of solving the puzzle, and now we would all search the game board.
So we searched and searched, carefully marking with a pencil those parts of the board that we'd covered. Then we declared that we'd searched the whole board. We hadn't found a word matching the pattern. It was time to rip open the hint envelope.
The hint said
Poetry
The clue has the lines of two poems intermixed. You need to determine which lines come from which poem. Consider subject, rhyme, and meter. Emily Dickinson has a particular typographical style. Here's a stanza from a different Dickinson poem:
This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow,--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--Once you've done that, the poem titles should suggest how to interpret each line... do you still have your codesheet?
We'd been on the right track from time to time--but we'd hopped off to follow some wrong tracks. Now I figured that we would look over the lines of the poem, classify them as Dickinson/Yeats as best we could, figure out most of the letters in the target word, and find it on the wheel. But Alexandra was able to classify all of the lines, once again bending my ideas of what is possible without reference material. Soon we had the word: CLOCKWISE.
But why hadn't we found the answer on the game board earlier? Each line of the poem did indeed represent a Morse symbol, and we were indeed looking for a nine-letter word ending in "E" or "T". We'd marked the board sections as we'd finished searching them. When we found CLOCKWISE, we saw that its section had never been searched. We'd been hasty in declaring the hunt over.
At the time, we thought that was the only part of the board we overlooked. But researching for this write-up, I notice that we missed a couple of others, too. Probably we were getting punchy.