Lord Denney's Players has announced the winners of its nineth annual sonnet contest. Congratulations to the following award recipients:

• 1st Place: "A Tale of Salt" by Sam Morgan
• 2nd Place: "My Tongue Feels Like Sandpaper" by Rowan Fleming
• Honorable Mention: "To Fetch or Not to Fetch" by Maheshwar Sai Ganesh

Each year, LDP partners with the Department of English and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies to invite Ohio State undergraduates from all colleges and majors to submit individual Shakespearean sonnets. Winning sonnets earn $200 for first place, $100 for second place and $50 for honorable mention.

"A Tale of Salt" by Sam Morgan

So caught betwixt the ocean and the stream,
The lust of salt; the steady course ahead, 
To act, to disentangle fortune’s scheme, 
Constrained to trail a solitary thread, 
’Tis so to choose, and doing so, to chain, 
But worse to weigh the way each path may wend 
And ne’er escape a heart sundered in twain 
So doomed to linger listless to the end. 
The sea will spit and sway with no regard 
For if her storms and salt offend a soul; 
The stream does not esteem his purpose marred 
if some consider his a life unwhole. 
So as all rivers end or join the swell, 
my final breath a tale of salt will tell.

"My Tongue Feels Like Sandpaper" by Rowan Fleming

My wake will stay its course until the dawn 
when sleep will snake my bones and flick its tongue. 
But while it coils in dusky folds I’ve long 
to bear my stomach’s strings be tightly strung 
and fear my restlessness bids death anear. 
With every blink my candle’s wax will drip. 
Sleep comes not readily where minds have fear, 
as ‘round the mill old horses trot when whipped. 
Dark’s liveliness will steal from that of day’s; 
at morn my mind is mewed in wintry fog. 
I haven’t stripling’s time with which to pray 
I find sleep’s love ere nighttime’s mocking songs. 
My coffee-burned tongue can make no cases. 
At morn I go, tabescent, to the races.

"To Fetch or Not to Fetch" by Maheshwar Sai Ganesh

On four white socks he sprints through e’ry day;
A flash of grey, his prints dispersed asunder.
My every command, Milo doth swift obey;
Upon my bed, he sleeps through loudest thunder.
At the field, Milo finds his own fresh grub;
Through the vast green, he dives deep within weeds.
In the mud he rolls, loathing the soapy scrub;
The squirrels and birds banished up their trees.
Yet, when I fling his ball, Milo ne’er takes;
While it whips through air, he looks on unspurred.
A loud silence in the garden doth remain;
Still he lays, not a single paw stirred.
Staring back at me, as if doubting my sanity,
For throwing his precious gift away, oh the vanity!