In Competition No. 2431 you were invited to write a poem commemorating the recent death of the whale in the Thames.
Verse marking a special occasion can be serious (Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’) or light (Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’). I can only explain the fact that this was the smallest entry I have ever received by the supposition that many of you wrongly thought that I was asking for a funny poem on an unfunny subject. Perhaps it would have been easier to treat the subject with a straight face if it hadn’t been a bottle-nosed whale. Only four competitors managed to be prizeworthy. Printed below, they get £35 each, and the bonus fiver goes to G. McIlraith. Printed below them, I give you Horace Walpole’s ‘Epitaph on Two Piping Bullfinches of Lady Ossory’s, Buried under a Rose-Bush in her Garden’.
It was in the chill January of two thousand and six
That the mighty Thames became the river Styx
For one northern bottle-nosed whale which got completely lost
And instead of braving the Atlantic tempest-tossed
It swam through our capital city while vast crowds lined
The Embankment and the bridges and hoped it would find
Somewhere to turn and swim back to sea,
But such an outcome was sadly not to be.
So brave rescue services, although it was so large,
Captured it in a sling and put it on a barge
And the paparazzi and other media folk
Took many pictures, but, alas, it was no joke,
For the whale died; though the publicity it was able to gain
For its troubled species means it may not have died in vain.
Perhaps it would have fared better swimming further north,
Into the silvery Tay or even the Firth of Forth.
G. McIlraith
‘Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?’
As God demanded in that puzzling book.
Today enlightened thought and special skill
Combine to save such marvels, not to kill.
All helpless, though, we watch a giant veer
On anguished course and aimless wild career:
From bank to bank now feebler still it goes,
In crazed gyrations and convulsive throes.
Yet expertise and keen assistance tried
To launch that bulk on some propitious tide,
Drawn by a fellow mammal’s plight to find
The strange affinity that links mankind.
Have not whales sung, with almost human sound,
To charm the awestruck mariners around?
But efforts are in vain: the creature dies,
To stir the heart and cloud a nation’s eyes.
Godfrey Bullard
This whale was cool,
A Cool Britannia whale
And nobody’s fool.
In her tiny brain
This celebrity whale
Was out for gain.
Westminster or die,
Decided this whale,
And a brilliant try
It was — but she beached,
This most hubristic whale,
With the goal not reached.
Like Pigmy Oaten, and Hammerhead Hughes,
Like Bottle-nosed Charlie Kennedy,
She gambled to win and lost it to lose —
So ought not to merit a threnody.
Richard Ellis
’Twas on the 20th January, 2006, a Friday,
That a great whale made our river Thames its highway,
Which is very exciting because such a bonny creature
Is not normally in the Thames a regular feature.
While some said that its watery journey was an Act of God,
Others averred it was lost from its group (which is called a pod)
And that every northern bottle-nosed whale, when troubled and frantic,
Swims west, which in this case was up the Thames, towards the Atlantic.
Alas, the poor mammal was in great distress,
Not knowing how on the Embankment the people did press
To cheer it on, and the rescuers who were trying
To save it from grounding at Battersea Bridge, and dying.
Despite a mattress and antibiotics from a vet,
The brave swimmer gave up its soul before the sun was set,
And all round the world went the news of its last sad foray.
We will all remember 21st of January, which was a Saturday.
D.A. Prince
All flesh is grass, and so are feathers too:
Finches must die, as well as I and you.
Beneath a damask rose, in good old age,
Here lies the tenant of a noble cage.
For forty moons he charmed his lady’s ear
And piped obedient oft as she drew near,
Though now stretched out upon a clay-cold bier.
But when the last shrill flageolet shall sound,
And raise all dickybirds from holy ground,
His little corpse again its wings shall plume,
And sing eternally the self-same tune,
From everlasting night to everlasting noon.
No. 2434: Trochaics
You are invited to write a poem in trochaics (the metre of Longfellow’s Hiawatha) entitled ‘Breakfast’. Maximum 16 lines. Entries to ‘Competition No. 2434’ by 9 March.
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