In Competition No. 3236, you were invited to submit a poem that begins ‘Oh my love is like…’ .

From the funny and sweet to the waspish and jaundiced, the entry ranged pleasingly far and wide; as the poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote in his sonnet ‘The Hospital’ (‘A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward/ Of a chest hospital…), ‘But nothing whatever is by love debarred…’