No. 1206: The winners

Jaspistos reports: Competitors were asked for a poem in praise of some natural phenomenon traditionally regarded as unpleasant.

Come; and strong within us Stir the vikings' blood; Bracing brain and sinew; Blow, thou wind of God!

So Charles Kingsley, addressing a nor'-easter, no doubt from comfortably inside a sou'-wester. It's surprising that Max Beerbohm passed over this opportunity of a cartoon: the Bard declaiming in the teeth of a gale, watched by some puzzled and very unNordic members of the lower orders, Well, you did your cheerful British best, and, scorning a from a race of gardeners, gave me foison of slugs. Admittedly there were poems in praise of a tapeworm and of death (an indisputably unpleasant natural phenomenon), even one in praise of a fart, but slugs had a clear majority. Thanks to Ron Jowker — and a book, published in 1935, with a chapter entitled 'Some Laudable Customs of the Slug' — I now know that, well-boiled in milk, they were reputed to cure tuberculosis. My retrospective sympathies go to those who got no results.

The. winners this week, who get £8 each, were those who succeeded best in striking an authentic note of praise with a reasonably straight face, I am grateful to Peter Peterson, the only winner to keep away from gastropods, for not having used 'slug-a-beds' in his first verse.

Anticyclonic gloom, delight Of lovers and of sleepy-heads, Who, by converting day to night, Can still the qualms of lie-a-beds, For making early rising hard Accept the thanks of a snug bard!

Besides, there is another thing, Even of greater joy than this, That you alone to mankind bring: The certainty of future bliss!

For, when your leaden skies we curse, We know tomorrow can't be worse.

(Peter Peterson)

Dear snail, your silver track I trace, And envy your unhurried pace; I turn to you from life's rat-race For consolation.

In your own house you dwell content You pay no mortgage, rates or rent And dreary winter days are spent In hibernation. (0. Smith) After the giant ferns, your royal parade Showed you a king before the birth of man, His limbs at angles and his brain half made.

Perhaps his only function in the plan Is to look back and see what things have been: Shapes like your own that silently reprove His boasts of grace, the dryness of his skin, His brief and feverish rule, his lack of love. Why, even now, a million years too late, He sees that same ancestral shape, that dined Upon the ferns, beside his garden gate, And curses it as ugly, to his mind.

Well may he curse, as slugs outlive his rage And beautifully move from age to age.

, (Paul Griffin)

This morning when I went and dug The garden, i perceived a slug, A whopping one, and where he'd been, Over the stones and in between, He'd left a silver track behind.

Forgotten lines came back to mind About a toad, which Shakespeare said Wore yet a jewel in his head.

Here was another one despised, Who could display, though hardly prized, Silver and gold, because this fellow Had frilly edges trimmed with yellow.

They rippled as I watched him go, So silent and so very slow.

I watched him go because, by gosh, He was too beautiful to squash.

(Joyce Johnson)

Our poets have not written Odes' on your mating dance, And gardeners abhor you, Putting pellets round their plants.

But there are those who love you For your mucus, mollusc-meat, Your mantle and your tentacles And slimy foot — not feet. Your love-life keeps you in a whirl, For you are boy as well as girl; Nor do your gleaming eggs of pearl Need incubation.

I'll save you from the cruel thrush, Or wanton boot that seeks to crush, And hide you in my neighbour's luSh Spring vegetation.

For without all your protein Ambrosia to a bird -

The nightingale and skylark Might never have been heard.