Laughing matter

In Competition No. 3006 you were invited to submit a sonnet that takes as its opening line Keats’s ‘Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell:’ (This was a sonnet Keats chose not to publish but transcribed into a long letter he wrote over a period in early 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats, his brother and sister-in-law.)
 
The challenge drew a pleasingly large, inventive and witty entry which saw you deploy a range of sonnet patterns (there are some 30 variations of the form in The Oxford Book of English Verse).
 
In an especially closely contested week, Julia Munrow, J. Garth Taylor, Chris O’Carroll, Susan McLean, Virginia Price Evans, Paul Freeman, Alanna Blake, Roger Rengold and Mike Morrison earn a special mention. And it was with great regret that I disqualified W.J. Webster on account of an uncharacteristic slip. (His otherwise excellent entry began, ‘Why did I laugh last night…’.