Competition | 28 May 2011

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition

In Competition No. 2697 you were invited to take as your first line ‘How do I hate you? Let me count the ways’ and continue in verse for up to a further 15.
Readers are no doubt familiar with the  given first line, which comes, with an impertinent tweak, from the penultimate sonnet in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sequence of 44, ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. And, on the subject of tweaks, Gerard Benson tells me that if you look at EBB’s manuscript in the British Museum Reading Room you will see that line 12 of the poem originally read not, ‘I love thee with the love I seemed to lose/ With my lost saints…’, but with my lost ‘Lord’.

The challenge unleashed an avalanche of heartfelt entries. The standard was high and it was with considerable regret that I disqualified contributions from David Silverman, Elizabeth Teather and Lance Levens for misreading the brief and sticking to the original ‘thee’.