What the clerihew can do for you
Or, making lives rhyme in OCD ABAB
When young Edmund Clerihew Bentley was bored out of his cranium in chemistry class, he made up a genre of light verse. Forced to consider the work of Sir Humphry Davy, the inventor of electrochemistry and isolator of sodium, potassium, and several of the less tasty elements, the 16-year-old Bentley scribbled:
Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
His classmate G.K. Chesterton sketched the doodle above, and thus in 1890 the clerihew was born: A goofy four-line biographical poem of learned insouciance.
Bentley went on to practice law, write popular mystery novels, and run the editorial page of the Daily Telegraph, but his singular lasting claim to fame would be his silly poems about singular lasting claims to fame.
The rules of the clerihew — Bentley gave the form his distinctive middle name, which is an argument in favour of distinctive middle names — are the best part, essentially a formula for wearing erudition lightly. What’s the point of knowing things if not to joke about them?
1. A clerihew must have four lines, and the first must end with the subject’s surname.
Start with a main character, find a rhyme for their last name, and you’re nearly done. The trickier the name, the better:
The people of Spain think Cervantes
Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes:
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.
2. The rhyme structure must be AABB.
Simpler even than its country cousin the limerick, the clerihew can be (and generally should be) written by schoolchildren. Once you have the name and the first rhyme, use the last half to bring it all home.
3. It shouldn’t scan.
If the emphasis of the clerihew can easily be identified, you’re doing it wrong. “Metrical clumsiness is very much a desideratum,” Stephen Fry wrote in his assessment of the form. “Indeed, it is considered very bad form for a clerihew to scan.” Here’s a particularly unscannable one of Fry’s:
Oscar Wilde
Had his reputation defiled.
When he was led from the dock in tears
He said ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at two years.’
4. It must contain a biographical truth.
Ideally, it’s funny because it’s true. At best, it’s a knowing wink — we’re all well aware of the facts and can safely riff upon them. This one by E.W. Fordham nicely captures its subject’s coquettishness:
Miss Mae West
Is one of the best;
I would rather not
Say the best what.
5. It must be free of malice.
This is sort of a speed-limit rule — usually broken but good as a general signpost. As the poet Gavin Ewart summarizes in his introduction to Bentley’s collected clerihews, “It’s mainly a question of tone, and the tone of the clerihew is both civilized and dotty.” Contain your smut to limericks, please.
6. If it takes more than two minutes to think up, it isn’t going to work.
This is the best rule because it keeps the light verse from gaining weight. It’s a direct quote from Paul Ingram, a modern-day master of the form. Tellingly, Ingram’s not a poet by trade but a bookseller, the longtime proprietor of Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City and a man who’s handled more biographies than most. And as a bookseller, he’s entitled to this one:
Jeff Bezos
Believed he was Jesos
He left out no detail
In dismantling retail
Ingram’s book features clerihews ruder than Bentley intended, bending rule 5, and he describes their spontaneous creation as “more neurological than artistic.” They’re OCD in ABAB.
Summing up all of the above, or perhaps totally ignoring it, the below clerihew by Ingram (with accompanying illustration by Julia Anderson-Miller) is my favourite:
Mark Rothko
Drove down to Costco
For a barrel of gesso
And ten pounds of espresso
Quick quips; lightning
“Success and failure are equally disastrous.”
— Tennessee Williams
“I don’t think anybody should write his autobiography until after he is dead.”
— Samuel Goldwyn
“The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this the uncivilized have never forgiven them”
— Cyril Connolly
Speaking of...
“Evelyn Waugh
Can stick in the craw
Of the shy, the gentle,
And the sentimental”
— Paul Ingram
“Karl Kraus
Always had some grouse
Among his bete noires
Were Viennese choirs.”
— W.H. Auden
Does GWQ No. 126 scan? Or does it make heads explode like in the movie Scanners? Auden’s clerihews were widely panned as “the least effective verse he ever wrote,” so take light verse lightly at your peril. Maybe go clerihew yourself as a form of therapy? Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting can easily be read in chemistry class. Tapping the ❤️ below is very much a desideratum.