In Competition No. 3338 you were invited to submit an essay on the topic of evolution in the style of the writer of your choice.

In a top-notch entry, Basil Ransome-Davies’s twist on Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’, Janine Beacham’s Edgar Allan Poe and Russell Chamberlain’s imagining of Kipling’s final Just So story, How Every Creature Got All Its Characteristics, earn honourable mentions:

I have pondered in times numerous, as via fossils, skull to humerus,
how our ancestors developed through six million years or more –
and agreed with the solution, as per Darwin, evolution;
thus, the change from apelike primates to bipedal I’ll explore.
’Tis a tale of Homo sapiens, and all that came before – ages past the dinosaur.

As does Nicholas Stone’s W.S. Gilbert:

I am the very model of a modern Homo sapiens
Which is to say one shaped by many others’ quite unhappy ends
Who didn’t make it through and didn’t pass along their chromosomes
To wander down the ages with a knapsack as a roamer roams;

But the prizes are awarded to the winners below, who each pocket £30.

Ben Darwin was a naturalist,
Blew God to smithereens
When, looking though his denim trews,
He found some mutant genes!

Said Ben, ‘In time, we slowly change,
Though Churchmen get the jitters:
Our body’s engineers adapt –
The survival of the fitters!

‘It’s why my finches have new beaks,
Why a turkey has a wattle:
You cannot bottle out of genes –
The genie’s out the bottle!’

Said Nell, ‘It’s natural to select:
What cost not changing shape?’
Said Ben, ‘An ’ap’orth, if you please,
Each time that we go ape!’

Bill Greenwell/Thomas Hood

I am the absolute pinnacle of evolution in the theatre. An audience in search of amusement will find me the natural selection: my Mother told me so when I was no more than a little eggy something and subsequent events have only confirmed her opinion. Evolution is the process by which practice finally deigns to fulfil its proverbial promise by making perfect. History is sadly littered with the poorly struck and fortuitously unmemorable witticisms of Cowards past, wretched costermongers all, not one of whose names illuminated the West End for a moment, but each of whom made his attempt, be it ever so meagre, to hit the mark I have struck with such vivacious aplomb. About the augmentation of Creation through innovation and adaption, Darwin was probably right. Evolution has run its interminable course and here I stand, every inch Homo superior. The proof of my theory? Your rapturous applause.

Adrian Fry/Noël Coward

Revolution – no, that’s French. Evolution – I’m sure I know the answer – evolution was invented by Charles Darwin. He knew Mr Dodgson. He said all life came out of a warm little pond, just like the creatures coming out of my pool of tears. They called it primordial soup, though I’m sure I shouldn’t like to drink it. And humans were once monkeys, though the Bishop of Oxford said that was nonsense. Bishops move diagonally, you know. Oh dear! I sound like Mabel. Next, we don’t want to become extinct. I was afraid I would, when I became so small. We have to adapt, as I did then, and when I was so tall. Or when the baby turned into a pig, or a pawn becomes a queen. Only the fittest survive. Mr Dodgson says I look very fit when he photographs me. I wonder if I’ll survive.

Nicholas Hodgson/Alice Liddell

Mr Leopold Bloom rejected all temptatious notions of porage. Evi-lution — the soupy source of all sin, its bubblous clinging mess. Pre-Eve, it was, that sauciful pot of Existence, out of which himself and Molly and all the regenerate and degenerate others had climbed. He hummed a hymn, prodding his mind for more school-day scraps of the Primeval. Fishy, decidedly. The origenous slime of Being, crawling from innocence to the rocky shore of becoming Upright. How had uprightliness tied itself to sin, he wondered, lifting the kettle from the hob. Splutter, splutter. Become a species — many species — slowly, slowly. A fried egg, perhaps. He was getting there himself, the old memory of wall-chart evi-lutting letting light into the kitchen gloom. That half-way stage, on two feet.

— Mkgnao.

— Milk for the pussens? Who knew how cats had wriggled out of the first fishiness? Mrkgnao. Four feet, for her. A jumper. The eve-ryness of becoming.

D.A. Prince/James Joyce

‘Nothing will come of nothing’ – ’tis well said,
For all the world’s a mighty relay race,
And all our ancient kinsmen merely players.
They have their facets and resemblances
But Nature in its time played many parts.
At first, cold microbes, harbingers of life,
Our antique parents, silent on the rocks,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans sense, sans merry wit;
Then, single cell weird sisters in the soup,
Primordial progenitors profuse,
Then sponges, worms and molluscs, arthropods,
Creepy-like snails, most willing genes to pool,
Till all the world was peopled with low life
And Man, the paragon of animals
Took arms against all Nature, great and small
And, by opposing, ended it withal.

David Silverman/William Shakespeare

No. 3341: Fine art

You are invited to submit a poem about a great work of art. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 13 March./>