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Title: “Please Form Two Lines”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a seven-letter, two-word phrase.
Answer: CHEER UP
Correct entries: 156 overall, of which 66 were solo
Just 66 solo solves! This was a real-live Week 5, folks.
First insight: By length and placement it looks like we have six theme entries: FALL COLORS, THAT’S LIFE, ENTER INTO, HEAVY RAIN, EACH OTHER, and SOME PEOPLE. The commonality they share? Each is a two-word phrase in which one of the words is exactly four letters long. Could certainly be a coincidence, but work looking into.
Second insight: the instructions require a seven-letter answer, but there are only six of our presumed theme entries. Where might we find a seventh? The logical place to look, since it keeps the theme symmetry, is a the five-letter across, MUST I?. Small but important a-ha moment here, since it strengthens the argument that the four-letter words are relevant, since now we have a seventh.
Third insight: tough one here. The four-letter words are FALL LIFE INTO MUST RAIN EACH SOME. All very common words, so now what? Anagram? Add a letter? Subtract a letter? Can they all precede/follow some other word to make a common phrase?
No, no, no, and no are the answers to those theories. The correct path is counterintuitive since it doesn’t directly use the four-ness of these words: you use them to construct a famous (-ish?) line of poetry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Into each life, some rain must fall.” This is from his 1873 poem “The Rainy Day.”
Now what? Using the order of these seven words in the grid doesn’t lead to anything; for example, if you take the first letter of their clues in that order you get BTTTFQO, which is not promising.
As so often in a meta: when you don’t know what the next step is, look at the title. Often the title isn’t useful until later on in your solving path, and that was the case here. “Please Form Two Lines,” it requests, but we’ve only got one line of poetry here. Where’s the second one?
Fourth and final insight: Checking out the poem, we see that “Into each life, some rain must fall” is the next-to-last line in the poem, so maybe the title is nudging us to use the last line as well? Let’s take a look!
That last line reads “Some days must be dark and dreary” — and lo, didn’t we just see the word dreary at some point in the solve? Indeed we did, with POE at 67-D, clued as [Dreary author]. Tugging on that thread, we see that each of the seven words in this final line of the poem begins exactly one clue. In grid order from top-to-bottom, they are:
1-A: [Some state employees] = COPS
10-A: [“Days of Thunder” scorer Zimmer] = HANS
26-D: [“Must Love Dogs” got two stars from him] = EBERT
39-A: [Be mistaken] = ERR
54-A: [Dark cartoon character] = REN
65-A: [“And…this might be trouble”] = UH-OH
67-D: [Dreary author] = POE
Laura M says:
I figured out the “rain must fall” line first and Google told me it was an Ella Fitzgerald song, which made sense since she was in the grid. So I was looking for other Ella songs for a while, nice red herring 🙂
Ack, not an intentional red herring. There’s an Ella Fitzgerald song called “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” that uses that line from the Longfellow poem, but not the line that follows it. In my first iteration of this puzzle I was planning POEM at 1-A and ELLA at the last Across, but then I thought, Week 5, let’s let solvers find it.
So I wrote the grid, and then ELLA magically appeared in the lower-right without my trying. It would’ve been easy to get rid of, but I thought, let’s leave it in, even though it could be a red herring since, again, the relevant last line of the poem doesn’t appear in the lyrics. But it turns out have caused more confusion than anything else so I should’ve probably left ELLA out of the grid altogether.
HazMat writes (from either Portland, Me. or Boston, not sure):
It’s dark and dreary here in Longfellow’s home town. Solving this week 5 definitely cheered us up! Thanks Matt.
Similarly rkval, on the other side of the country:
Hello from Tacoma, WA, where this day is dark and dreary and some rain is, indeed, falling.
And finally,MamaEllen liked it:
This one was excellent! I’ve walked over the Longfellow Bridge in Boston many times 🙂
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a sport you’ll see at the Olympics this summer.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.