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.
O prescient mollusc! Long thy name
Shall live in FIFA’s Hall of Fame!
Who scried, through psychic power occult,
Unerringly each match result.
No common octopus was this,
Who never put a foot amiss,
’Til now — mourned magus of the Cup! —
Untimely death has tripped him up.
Far from the clash of striving teams,
Now lies he on the field of dreams,
Engulfed in an eternal sleep,
The Nostradamus of the deep.
Penelope Mackie
A football-world celebrity tentacular
Has moved on to a higher realm’s
aquarium.
No more on this plane will he wax oracular
With only shellfish snacks for honorarium.
Detractors held Paul Oktopus in low
regard —
The fame he gained was railed against with
vehemence
By irate skeptic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
As proof of superstitious Western
decadence,
While some teams’ fans blamed losses on
the Tintenfisch,
Proposing with a hungry, vengeful
truculence
That chefs should sear the seer to make a
banquet dish,
Reducing Delphic prowess to mere
succulence —
But now serene he swims above the earthly
fray,
His name enshrined eternally in sporting
lore,
Enjoying Otherworld Cup games
immortals play,
Prognosticating victory forevermore.
Chris O’Carroll
His fellow creatures from the deep,
Awash with briny tears, still weep:
For Paul is dead. He’ll give no more
Bold octopodcasts of the score.
As woeful his passing, in its way,
As England’s on the field of play.
For what he offered was distraction
From a wretched lack of action,
When talking points — apart from Paul —
Were vuvuzelas and the ball.
Well-armed with his prophetic gift
He left non-psychic pundits miffed;
And had he lived to hone his skill,
What price the likes of William Hill?
Indeed, poor Paul might have foretold
That with such powers he’d not grow old.
W.J. Webster
The horror of my childish dreams,
The spook that haunts me as I swim —
How sick, how curious it seems
When others praise and honour him;
And yet it cannot be denied
That there’s a proper sense of pride
Since he so opportunely died
Infallible of limb.
No reason now to speculate
What sad conversion might befall
If once the friendliness of Fate
Had turned capricious after all.
How silent then the poet’s tongue,
And he as high as Haman hung,
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung,
Decanonise Saint Paul.
Mary Holtby
No. 2677: BAH HUMBUG!
You are invited to provide a poem in dispraise of Christmas (16 lines maximum). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 8 December.
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