Competition | 27 November 2010

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition

In Competition No. 2674 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of Paul the Octopus, who died peacefully in his tank last month aged a respectable two-and-a-half. Paul was catapulted from the obscurity of an aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany to international celebrity when he accurately predicted the outcome of several World Cup matches.

Commendations to Jerome Betts and Bill Greenwell. The bonus fiver is Noel Petty’s. His fellow winners get £25 each.

Great Paul, the psychic octopus, is dead,
His wisdom lost, locked in that mighty head.
Eight times his art was tried, eight times it
passed,
Thus proving that the future is precast.

The ancient riddles yielded to his skill —
Ones of Determinism and free Will
That had eluded Aristotle’s clutch
And bothered Calvin (though perhaps not much).

But here’s the irony: in praising Paul
We miss the Truth he laboured to install.
He did not earn the plaudits he obtained
Since he himself proved all was preordained.

He left one prophecy to cheer us up —
That we should host the next-but-one World Cup.
But mark — for those who loathe the wretched
game,
It Was To Be, so Paul is not to blame.
Noel Petty


So cruelly snatched from Dorset’s cliff-girt shore
To some inland Teutonic pleasure dome;
Condemned to live in claustrophobic tanks
And face the bovine public’s stolid gaze;
Then forced to make predictions, mussel-based,
Of contests in some distant Afric land:
That German strength would prosper early on
And then succumb to pure Hispanic flair
Which later would subdue the brutal Dutch.
All true, but seldom is the seer believed:
Thus did Cassandra, Priam’s luckless seed,
In vain warn of Hellenic equine gifts.
We mourn thee, Paul, just two years on this earth;
The normal span for octopodes, yet
Did some embittered hand hasten the day
Of thy demise? We surely should be told.
Roger Theobald


Now let the solemn funeral drum
Resound through each aquarium,
As Paul, the polypodic seer,
Is laid upon his briny bier.