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.