A Few Clerihew

John Donne

Was a dirty old man

Who likened fondling and seduction

To New World exploration

 

John Milton

Was a glutton for Stilton

Nightmares from cheese on toast

Resulted in Paradise Lost

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Couldn’t stop frowning

Like many lady Victorians

She was hooked on laudanum

 

© Kim M. Russell, 2016

My response to dVerse Poets Pub Form For All; the Clerihew

Gayle from Bodhirose’s Blog is our host this evening for Form-For-All/Meeting the Bar and she has invited us to play with humour and couplets in a form called a Clerihew: comic verse on biographical topics consisting of two couplets and a specific rhyming scheme of aabb that was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, an English novelist and humorist.   The poem deals with a person or character in the first line.  In most cases, the first line names a celebrity or well-known person and the second line rhymes with the name of the person.

Here are two of the more popular Clerihew that Bentley wrote as examples:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”


 

33 thoughts on “A Few Clerihew”

    1. Thanks Gayle. I’m back from the hospital and my eyes are just beginning to get back to normal again. Luckily I don’t have to go back. I just have to use the Amsler grid to make sure nothing untoward is happening.

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  10. You really got into the limerick mode, & the results are great fun. Clerihews feel/sound/look a lot like limericks to me. I applaud your almost rhyming, pushing us outside the conventional.

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