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’. Commendations, too, to John Whitworth, Robert Schechter, Carolyn Beckingham, Josephine Boyle and Ray Kelley. The winning six, printed below, earn their authors £25 apiece. Alan Millard pockets the extra fiver.
How do I hate you? Let me count the ways.
I hate you calling Robert ‘thee’ when ‘you’
Would do as well; I hate the rosy hue
With which you colour every flowery phrase;
I hate the way you rabbit on and rave
In mawkish metaphors of love that knows
No limits but miraculously grows,
If you’re to be believed, beyond the grave!
I hate you for your similes, your rhymes,
Your every prissy, pious platitude;
I hate your saintly, nauseous attitude
To love long since consigned to fabled times;
I hate the way you’ve wormed your way into
The Nation’s Favourite Poems, fame indeed!
Small wonder then, of all the verse I read,
No sonnet could I hate so much as you!
Alan Millard
How do I hate you? Let me count the ways:
First, you were rich, successful, quite a dish,
Able to satisfy my every wish
Save one; for as my father rudely says,
I needed someone to unlace my stays.
Your poetry had hooked me like a fish;
I could not see that I had made a bish,
Swept off my feet by your romantic ways.
In this Italian sun I quite forgot
Your drawbacks till I met my Silvio.
Deft-fingered boy, he does not say a lot:
Now he’s the high, I fear you are the low.
Robert, I know this puts you on the spot,
But, with apologies, I have to go.
Paul Griffin
How do I hate you, let me count the ways —
was ‘love thee’ once, but that’s a shopworn
phrase.
Whether our age inclines to love or hate
is, sadly, always open to debate
but there’s no doubt — at least not since
vers libre —
that thee is rarer than a checkered zebra.
Today’s most dated poet knows one must
commit one’s hast to ashes, dost to dust;
alack, alas, and O, shalt, goeth, thence,
apace with whither, wherefore, whence, and
hence.
I never liked thee, thou, or thy, or ye;
In your case, I’d say, cross out I and me.
It seems there’s no one pronoun that will do
for, come to that, I’m not too fond of you.
Frank Osen
How do I hate you? Let me count the ways
You thwart my best intentions, queer my pitch,
Upset my applecart into the ditch,
Deluge with water every hopeful blaze.
Your shadowy persistence haunts my days
From waking’s warm cocoon, the refuge which
Your cunning hand unravels, stitch by stitch,
While my resistant body still delays.
I start to dress — you tell me that won’t do;
I sit for breakfast and you burn my toast;
The paper’s there —my spectacles are lost;
Another subtle turning of the screw.
It’s the same story all the long day through.
Then the late bath runs cold. That is the most
Malicious stroke of an offensive ghost,
Till his low whisper tells me, I am you.
Mary Holtby
How do I hate you? Let me count the ways:
I hope your heart will shiver and be cracked if
You ever say again that you’re proactive,
Or use another jargon-ridden phrase.
I hate your office sophistry, the shower
Of suits who paddle after you with palm-tops,
The way you treat your PAs like alarm-clocks,
And use your sour mouth, pursuing power.
I hate your mad addiction to the media;
Your bonus culture leaves me very bitter;
You patronise the typists (‘Bring me tea, dear’),
And send a trail of electronic litter.
I trust you even less than Wikipedia.
Your knowledge wouldn’t fill a tweet on Twitter.
Bill Greenwell
How do I hate you? Let me count the ways:
I hate the way you finish all my meals;
Each time our trysts are subject to delays,
I hate you for the way this longing feels.
The means you have to strip me of my will,
My broken vows like gauzy veils of fluff;
Your kiss, that surfeits me, yet drains me still,
With one too much, yet thousands not enough.
You take my breath away, you course my veins;
Infusing me with you has been your knack —
The times I’ve tried to swear you off, my brain’s
A frenzy till you make me take you back.
Why kid myself? We can’t deny what’s true:
It’s me I hate, dear cigs, in loving you.
Brendan Beary
No. 2700: WINESPEAK
You are invited to submit an example of pretentious wine-writing (maximum 150 words). Please email entries, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 8 June. Please note that the closing date for No. 2699 is midday on 30 May, which is slightly earlier than usual.
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