Spectator competition winners: Keatsian sonnets

In Competition No. 3161 you were invited to supply a sonnet with certain rhyme words to be used in a given order.

Bout-rimés contests were a favourite parlour game of Dante Rossetti and his brother William, but the given end rhymes for this assignment come from a sonnet written in the winter of 1816 by John Keats. It was also the result of a competition — Keats and his friend Leigh Hunt challenged one another to write a sonnet on the subject of ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket’ and Keats apparently rustled one up in the space of 15 minutes (as did his opponent).

In an enormous and stellar entry, which thrummed with echoes of Keats, themes ranged from zombies to Bruce Forsyth, cricket to Thanos. It was especially difficult to whittle your fine sonnets down to a final six, and a record number of honourable mentions go to Lee Nash, Nick MacKinnon, Nick Syrett, Basil Ransome-Davies, Louise Devismes, Sasha A. Palmer, Chris Ray, Frank Upton, Ann Drysdale, Martin Elster, Bill Greenwell, Chris O’Carroll, Caroline Browne, Cameron Clark and David Harris, whose entry brought to mind Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori.

Those that made the final cut are printed below and their authors are rewarded with £25 each.

The poetry of Keats is all but dead.Few read today of his maturing sun,Care about vines that round the thatch-eaves runOr meet his mystic belle dame in the mead.His travels in the realms of gold don’t leadTo readers who are charmed. His day is done.The modern Muse’s fans want verse that’s fun,With rappers growing eulogies from weed.A thing of beauty, he believed, would neverPass into nothingness and winter frostWould never touch the bowers where nature shrills.He thought his nightingale would sing for ever.But he was wrong.