In Competition No. 3302, you were invited to compose a dating app profile for a writer of your choice.

To mark the centenary last year of Philip Larkin’s birth, the poet Imtiaz Dharker wrote ‘Swiping left on Larkin’ in which she imagined how, given his complicated relationship with intimacy, the poet would present himself on such an app. This led me to wonder how other writers might set themselves apart in the online dating scrum.

A shout-out to Paul A. Freeman’s Kipling (‘If you can eat steak rare when all about you/ Are ordering their sirloins darkly singed…’)’ and Max Ross’s Wordsworth (‘Sadly I wander lonely as a cloud/ And so I seek some kind companionship…’). Nick MacKinnon, Sue Pickard, Paul D. Amer and Philip Roe also caught my eye, but the winners earn £30.

That affairs of the heart may call on wellsprings of spontaneous emotion is not to be doubted. Ardour has its place. Yet how incautious we are if we jump at the promptings of what may well be an ignis fatuus – that is, a strong but ephemeral attraction, one might even say a gamble – such as the social mix inevitably throws up. Thus why not submit myself to the indelicacy of a catalogued auction mart, so to speak, where the appraisal of personality can be studious and distant?

Friends whisper that risk can never be eliminated even by a ‘dating culture’ with its own lexicon of protective codes. Forthrightness demands the admission that it can reduce jeopardy, with the added commendation that it promises to be of paramount service to the single gentleman fatigued by the orthodox round of visits and occasions who wishes to ‘hook up’ with kindred souls.

Basil Ransome-Davies/Henry James

Heaven-bent, I yearned to be alone,
Sole-minded, and in my passion all-obsessed –
In prayer and honest toil my soul was blest!
Yet now my yen for solitude has flown.

Before I grasped God’s grandeur – my vocation –
I praised the skylark and the nightingale;
Today my prayer-filled, Popish words entail
Days spent in heaven-enforcéd isolation.

I’m racked with demon-doubts, I fear I’m gay,
Close-folded peace has given way to strife,
My heart is drown’d in dread lest I should stray.

I seek a chaste companion, not a wife
But one who’ll turn the fall of dark to day
And bring some joy to my tormented life.

Sylvia Fairley/Gerard Manley Hopkins

I am the very model of a 19th-century gentleman
My smile reveals that I subscribe to what you’d call a Dental Plan
I love a woman’s company, my chat is never saccharin
I’m very energetic though my working life is knackerin’
My appetite is hearty and I like to eat a mutton whole
And there’s a scarlet flower always peeking from my buttonhole
You may be charmed to hear that I possess a rich and mellow tone
I own a private letterbox and latterly a telephone.

If you succumb, you need not fear that I turn out tyrannical
For in my acts of passion I am never puritanical
Surprise me when I’m bashful and observe me as I coyly start
Though not, I beg, when I am trading words with Mr D’Oyly Carte
I own a Tintoretto and a Maes, whose art had style and zing
And watch me clear the floor to dance an Eightsome Reel or Highland Fling
I’m whistle-clean and fragrant – for no gentleman is soapier
And if you love a library, mine is a cornucopia…

Bill Greenwell/W.S. Gilbert

Name: Sam. Sex: if unavoidable. Height: unexpectedly variable according to age. Appearance: gaunt as Easter Island statuary. Likes/dislikes: irrelevant. Purpose: Nil. Except. Except I seek another, despite futility of endeavour. Why? Amelioration in part or whole of loneliness during portion – precise duration to be determined – of indefinite deathward trudge. Someone, in short, else. With whom to exchange silences, share turnips (else carrots), fail to stave off that which cannot be staved off, only hastened and even then, with insufficient reliability. Desired properties of other: alone as self, if possible, so as to facilitate mutuality of experience. Unaffianced or of long-standing viduity. What might we not do together? Not play chess, for example. Not drink Irish whiskey. Not admire the landscape paintings of Jack B. Yeats. Not gaze into the temporary infinities of one another’s eyes. Click to connect with me. Connect to click with me.

Adrian Fry/Samuel Beckett

Young and easy, happy as the grass is green and prince of the apple towns: irresistible male, bard and cherubic bawd, heedless and carefree, all too ready to embrace a woman willing to run all the sun long through the hayfields high as the house, lovely as water – but not too watery in the wanton waywardness of Welsh whisky-down ways.

My appetite for Time’s playthings is only restrained by lacking all that is golden in the mercy of his means but with your gold we could be honoured among foxes and pheasants, drunk through all the lamb white days. I will write you dreaming wicked by the jolly-rodgered sea down the valleys of the windfall light if you will bring the means to mirror the magic and majesty of our bottle-bobbing billygoat where the mornings are all singing.

Boathouse (sleeps two) though sleep is far from my thoughts. Say yes.

D.A. Prince/Dylan Thomas

No. 3305: Sonnet on sonnets

You are invited to submit a sonnet entitled ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets’. Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 21 June.