In Competition No. 3342 you were invited to submit a proposal of marriage in the style of a famous writer.

The overall standard was high, and entries that impressed and amused include Bob Trewin’s Hemingway, Dorothy Pope’s Larkin and Nicholas Lee’s Conan Doyle. Janine Beacham’s Masefield’s also shone:

I must go down on one knee again, if you’ll wed
      me on the fly,

And all I ask is an office do, with no friends or
      family by…

The most prizeworthy are printed below and earn £25 each.

Because thou hast not nam’d the Day
Such Task doth fall – to Me
Am I too late? – I cannot wait
For all Eternity

My Heart is nigh to Overflow
A Reservoir – of Love
Must thou eschew Commitment still –
May Push ne’er come – to Shove?

Be thou my Soul’s – Fulfilment
Else am I incomplete
Wherefore thy limp Timidity –
What mak’st thou so effete?

O dire Despair – thou dost not care
One Jot! I’ll seek no Other,
Unwif’d, Unlif’d – I fear I should
Have listen’d to – my Mother

Mike Morrison/Emily Dickinson

Had we but world enough and time,
This urgence, lady, were no crime.
Yet, young, hot-blooded, still unwed,
We may be by temptation led,
Seek actions carnal and profane,
Defying edicts that constrain
To spoil our virtuous, virgin state –
To name it plain, to fornicate,
Unhallowed, fleshly, skin to skin.
Lust is, we know, a deadly sin.
Only the marriage bed can bless
Desire with seemly Godliness.
Dear heart, forgive my pressing haste,
But I would not have thee unchaste.
God speed the day when we shall be
United pure and lawfully!

Basil Ransome-Davies/Andrew Marvell

My dear, dear Mr Darcy,

Won’t you marry me? For it is a truth universally acknowledged that an impecunious gentlewoman with ambitions to establish herself as an Author must be in want of a rich husband, and preferably a handsome one. I often imagine – though I dare not write – a scene in which you come to me having swum a lake, in a tight and quite voluptuously wet shirt. But I am all too conscious of the impediments to any proposed matrimonial union that would present themselves, were such a match to be proposed. First, the difference in social level; and secondly, the fact that in reality you do not actually exist. Regrettably it seems that you shall have to wed one of the Bennet sisters, though which I have yet to ascertain, since thus far I have devised only three.
Would that I might have been
Yours eternally

Brian Murdoch/Jane Austen

I’ve messed aboot, I’ve wooed and played.
Before ye noo ma heart is laid,
Nae mair I’ll mess ye,
I won’t be happy till we’re wed,
Ma bonnie lassie.

I’ll hae ye sittin’ on ma knee,
A faithful Rabbie you will see,
There’s nae one else but you for me
Ma lovely Jean.
I’ll love you till the day I dee.
So be ma queen.

Max Ross/Robert Burns

In the great, grand compass of personal affinities, dear lady, there are gradations at once clearly discernible and yet shifting and elusive. But we may, I sense, agree that one’s advances through life, occasionally triumphant, too often hobbled and bathetic, are ever enhanced by the presence of a companion, a person alongside whom we break the bread of mutual sustenance as we travel. With such a companion there is no yoke of kinship or duty, simply an acknowledged thread of settled connection. However, a time may come when a fear of that link’s being adventitiously broken outweighs any residual yearning for untrammelled independence. Then it is that a public avowal is required of the desire to seal that precious bond in human permanence. In such a spirit, my dear, dear lady, you see me here supplicant for your hand in the sanctity of marital union.

W.J. Webster/Henry James

Will you, for God’s sake, marry me, woman? Don’t just stand there, looking pulchritudinous: reply! Not with some string of noncommittal, middle-class, Sunday supplement homilies, semi-digested Liberal party manifesto commitments and a lifetime of miseducation at the hands of your hidebound Mummy and Daddy and their complacent, sherry-sipping dinner-party guests. No, let me hear a full-throated, molten affirmation sufficient to echo down through whatever joint future of passion, acrimony, even alimony our union might result in. Whether we wring out our fate in this dead-and-alive hole or at some country fastness beyond our wildest imaginings, let this be the living, breathing, seething moment you risked your fluttering heart on the one, single person in your hitherto circumscribed, cosseted little life who, heart fluttering synchronously, might actually be able to reach right in through those flaming, blazing eyes and touch you, as you do me, to the very offal.

Adrian Fry/John Osborne

No. 3345: This sporting life

The 19th-century critic and journalist William Hazlitt wrote a celebrated account of a boxing match. You are invited to submit a report on a popular sporting event as it might have been written be someone who is not first and foremost a sportswriter. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 10 April./>