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The clerihew is a relatively new poetry form introduced by Edmund Clerihew Bentley in 1905. It is usually a single quatrain of light verse rhyming aabb, without a standard meter. The first line usually ends with a name, often one difficult to rhyme with, and comes up with a ridiculous rhyme for it in the second line. At the SCP, we usually require meter. Could the lack of meter in the clerihew be an attempt to capture a charming sense of school-boy doggerel or is it just a lack of skill and aversion to the modern stigma placed on tradition? At any rate, this contest seeks a specifically metrical clerihew just for the fun of it.
Talbot Hook has submitted the below metrical clerihew to get the ball rolling:
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The ever straight-shooting Diogenes,
No stranger to creatures’ biologies,
Gave Platonic depiction a lickin’
By presenting him with a plucked chicken.
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Post your metrical clerihew in the comments section below. The meter does not have to be the same as Mr. Hook’s above.
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A shrivelled-up bitch named Pelosi
Has a place in the House that is cozy.
When the GOP come, she’ll be out on her bum —
Her future don’t look very rosy.
Excellent, I think! Would pray your clerihew becomes a new and a saner reality!
The recent house Pelosi break-in, was, of course, President Trump’s fault? As is each crisis on planet earth! Enough of fabled narratives!
Those pandemic games of Fauci’s
Offensive as any foul breeze;
In Congress, defended his rules –
“Don’t question my Science, you fools!”
King Saul
Was not a king that we would want at all,
And proved what kind of trouble having a king
Would bring.
King David
So avid
For God’s house and after His heart
Gave the monarchy a second start.
The MLB Yank Aaron Judge
Gave Maris and Ruth each a nudge.
With 62 swings of his bat
He made both their records go splat.
The kitten-grabbing Donald Trump
came down to earth with a bump.
The voted out one-term president
is a White House ex-resident.
A senile buffoon is Joe Biden,
As cheap as aluminum sidin’.
When patriots come to start lynching the scum
I wonder where he will be hidin’.
President Biden
Acts like he’s died ‘n’
One day will awake and say
Where’ve I been since yesterday
When poor Joe Biden
took too much time deciding
whether to budge,
Kamala gave him a shove.
Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.
to some, a bit peculiar;
to seniors he gives a sense
of pride –
there’s humility, nobility in
in graciously stepping aside.
Oh dear, Donald Trump
Is back on the stump
Wooing voters to say yes
To another four year mess
Ukraine’s the cash cow of joe Biden.
We all know the things he’s hiding…
Corruption and incompetence,
Alzheimers, incontinence.
Mike!
A smash hit clerihew on Biden!-))
Hope the New House finds specifics. he’s hiden!
Patricia
Do you remember Jerry Springer?
Each show was a high-octane zinger.
When his guests weren’t fighting, their mum and dad issues
caused tear-leaky eyes and much reaching for tissues.
Gave me a chuckle! What an unfortunate kind of show that is . . .
The daughter of Victor Hugo
From a closet, picked her blue coat
“Else in this miserable cold,
I’ll be hunchbacked ere I grow old.”
Joe Biden’s boy’s a mighty Hunter,
Hunting drugs and sex and plunder.
He’s been found out so he’s bereft,
But he walks free, he’s on the left.
Free movie!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=54wM7qW4S4o
Hi, Mike, apparently youtube doesn’t like this video; they sat it’s “unavailable”.
Quarterback “Broadway Joe” Namath
Cashed in his Super Bowl fame with
Those cringe-worthy Medicare ads;
His work was much better in pads
That portly porker, Caligula,
was constipated. An enema
was thus injected in his ass.
His turds exploded like shards of glass.
This is the right dose your handling out.
The ineffable Guy Fieri
Is our nation’s greatest canary;
In each diner, drive-in, or dive,
He’ll confirm you can come out alive.
In France they were fond of Napoleon
Who consumed Europe with some aioli in.
The British, dismayed by his style,
Had him twice carted off into exile.
A writer named Amanda Gorman
With luck that exceeds any four men,
Was named laureate poet of youth
But sans talent and challenged on truth.
Dr. Salemi’s limerick dressed as a clerihew above has me thinking that the clerihew may just be understood as a version of the limerick, perhaps better suited to difficult-to-rhyme names since you don’t need that second rhyme. But for many names, why not a limerick…
The entrepreneur Elon Musk
Is sharper than an elephant tusk:
He builds rocket ships, AI, microchips
And to politicians he is brusque.
Yes, Evan, you’re correct — I slipped into limerick form because it’s so easy to do when trying to compose a clerihew. Here’s a true clerihew in the more acceptable form:
Niccolo Machiavelli —
Was he really that bad? Oh well, he
Called things as they were,
And that always causes a stir.
The Blessed Virgin Mary
Was never once contrary
To God’s Law, or to any other—
A grace so she could be God’s mother!
The wife-fleeing Rip Van Winkle
Stopped in the woods for a twinkle;
But he aided a dutchman to carry his keg,
And awoke to find his beard reached his leg!
The anomaly Zaphod Beeblebrox,
More brainless than a large bag of rocks,
Is far more useless than a Quaker’s gun,
But he’s still the best bang since the big one.
(I couldn’t resist.)
If I had a choice of reading Ferlinghetti
or eating an unadorned bowl of spaghetti,
I’d opt for noodles sans sauce
rather than noodle-less dross.
Andrea Dworkin
Didn’t believe in porkin’.
“Intercourse is oppression!”
She screamed in a psychiatric session.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
Took a couple of days off.
A bell brought him out of his fog,
He said, “I must feed the dog!”
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Thought his ideas were peachy.
He once said that God was dead,
But God had the last word instead.
OR
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Was visited once by a preacher.
The reverend approached Nietzsche’s bed,
But God told him, “Nietzsche is dead.”
It’s reported that Great Socrates
Said hemlock’s a drink that agrees
With all the philosopher set…
The hangover’s not over yet!
Antonio López de Santa Anna
Met Yellow Rose in his cabana.
They say he scored, but when he snored
At San Jacinto he lost the war.
Everybody knows that Johnny Cash
Was up for making bets considered rash.
He ate a pound of peppers, then retired.
When morning came, he felt ‘The Ring of Fire.’
As an orator, young Aristotle
was renowned for a voice epiglottal.
Over time, as he waxed syllogistic,
he was deemed, sad to say, egotistic.
Joy Behar
Looks like she should be smoking a cigar.
She dominates “The View” —
A screechy, estrogen-challenged crew.
1
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Was genteel and almost saintly,
For he liked to poke fun
And wound with a pen, not a gun.
2
“Don’t mess with a Biden,” said Joe Biden
“I am Biden-in-chief and know how to frighten,
Why only the other day I was let loose by the podium
And let me tell you the carnage was truly odious.”
3
“We will fight to the end,” cried Boris Johnson
But the end came to soon, now he’s lonesome,
For the good times have ended
And now Carrie’s garden he’s tending.
4
“I am The President,” says Donald Trump,
“The one who comes first and will never be last-
Everyone knows I was not defeated
But was truly and roundly cheated.”
5
“ Please,” observed Charles the Third
“ Why can’t I say, Off with his head!
What is the point of being crowned King
When one is constantly told what to think!”
The Swiss have a cheese they call Klaus,
With more holes than a derelict house.
Guaranteed by elites to be better than sweets,
Though it’s spurned by the hungriest mouse.
Delightful.
Ever since they elected Liz Truss,
Our economy’s under a bus,
The news is so painful to foller,
Now the pound is worth less than the dollar
Great Clerihew!
A cynic might think it is almost as if she is going to ‘Truss’ the UK..
Pardon the pun, of course I couldn’t possibly comment.
The poet Fernando Pessoa
Was a difficult writer to know-a:
Every week he seemed a different man:
The sign of a short self attention-span.
The repressive tyrant Qin Shi Huang,
Believed in the right of the pitiless strong;
He buried alive some hundreds of scholars,
Then went belly-up with mercurial hollers.
Ketanji Brown Jackson,
When asked her reaction
To womanhood: just an apology
For not being versed in biology.
His Royal Highness King Charlie the Third
was once considered a nerd.
An original climate change battling warrior,
he’s watched our planet’s state getting sorrier and sorrier.
Senator Chuck Schumer
Would be improved with an inoperable tumor.
We thought he’d kick off
From a COVID-based cough
But alas, that was only a rumor.
George Joshua Richard Monbiot
(He’s “Moonbat” to those in the know.)
Is saving the earth from the terrible trio:
True Tories and beef and no snow.
Turkey has a president called Erdogan
Who boasts that he is friends with everyone,
Look at Armenians, Greeks, Syrians or Kurds,
They could be friends if they gave him their turf.
The man who keeps the border is Mayorkis.
When we say it is open, he will “Bork” us.
But when the border’s like a leaking sieve,
that makes it hard for honest folks to live.
If you want to kill off Count Dracula,
try U-V effects of a facula,
which to those in the know is a luminous spot
on our Sun’s solar disk – like an over-bright dot.
I just watched the 1931 Dracula with Bela Lugosi for the first time a week ago, so this made me smirk. It’s an oldie and a goodie. And I love the scientific nature of your clerihew.
The Hungarian Bela Lugosi
With the commies was overly cozy;
Fleeing his home to avoid further scares,
He was type-cast in Horror on account of his stares.
“Arrogant girl!” cried Athene,
when Arachne boasted of her very fine weaving,
“You can indeed be the weaving queen,
catching flies for your tea!”
Persnickety Maurice Ravel
Made audiences endure hell:
He took a theme the weight of a sparrow
And tortured it into his bloated Bolero.
Oktoberfest
A full-page ad gave readers’ sound advice.
“Do not binge drink or drink out of a shoe.
While the brass band plays with tubas and lutes,
I’ll start a new fad and drink from my boot.
The Debates
The wise old owl said “I don’t give a hoot
Because their posture and cant are truly moot.
With skullduggery vows, they quibble, refute—
But each with their snoot licks the hand pledging loot.”
Let’s spare a thought for Julius Caesar –
A statesman, a soldier, a true Roman geezer.
He died two thousand years ahead of his time,
the very first victim of senseless knife crime.
The Greeks were cultured; but in truth
The Romans were a bit uncouth.
And yet, when all is said and done
The Greeks lost and the Romans won.
Great clerihews.
This one though is thought- provoking.
Sadly the cultured lose and the uncouth win. It sounds a bit like the kind of essay question we used to get in school many years ago. The one that always made a statement and ended with Discuss.
Thanks Mia, glad you liked them. I remember those essay lead-ins, but I doubt if my clerihews will provoke any dissertations!
Witty and neat!
Thank you Lucia.
It’s said the Olympian Hermes
Could travel on winged sandals for his journeys
He could flit from the mortal to divine
Shame, I can’t even walk a straight line
You can write a clerihew so well done.
The man’s wife Lydia
Gave her husband Chlamydia.
So he lived in the shame
Of his daughter’s new name.
Very witty.
A Clerihew to the Environment
Public, John (and Jane) Q.
their vehicles garaged because there’s nothing they can do.
Animals roam freely, air quality improves.
As the quarantine is lifted, the Earth again disapproves.
Is it possible Robert Frost
in a bright yellow wood, got lost?
It all began when he was urged
to try to find two roads diverged!
Neatly done, Lucia.
A Clerihew Gone Amok
by E. Cleridew Basu
He is one of those about whom these days is written very little.
I guess, because his reputation, like Edward C. Bentley’s, was quite brittle.
A compatriot of James Thurber, in that terribly dismal era,
he was less like Ezra Pound than he was like Yogi Berra;
and yet these days, except for a few things, like green tea, pasta salad, and cash,
I would like to get a line or two from Frederic Ogden Nash.
As Agent James Bond, Sean Connery
Was gorgeous but always quite ornery
With lovely blue eyes, he was every girl’s spy
You can count me as one of them, honestly.
Father winter throws autumn blaze
Hold the moment in place
December shakes autumn
December tree crowns have lost their shape
Father Winter throws autumn blaze,
hold the moment in place.
December shakes autumn.
December tree crowns have lost their shape.
I have no doubt the worthy Francisco José de Goya
Y Lucientes would have had the brains to be a lawyer
But counsel’s wise opinion was, when all is said and done,
That artists can make money too and have a lot more fun.
The Irish fairies of folklore, the Sidhe;
Capture kids and refuse to let them free.
Obscured in the medows’s vibrant bluebells;
The fables live and cast their cursed spells.
Alessandro. Bottticelli
Painted women large in buttocks and belly.
Seeing the ads in Vogue, he’d not find sexy
Models so anorexy.
For you SEC football fans:
Bama’s Crimson Tide
Has a team deep and wide.
Fear Big Al,
Beat you he shall.
Auburn’s War Eagle ,
A mascot regal,
Swoops with a scream
Just like the team.
LSU
Is fun to boo,
But let’s admit, Coach Kelly
Has fire in the belly.
U of Mizzou
Is called “The Zoo,”
But mention their football crew
And everybody says, “Who?”
Texas A&M
Will kick your (ahem)
Someday, but not the way
They currently play.
Vanderbilt
Every year gets kilt.
Academics is their forte,
Not football sport.
Florida
Is like the bullfighting corrida
Where you are the toro
And they’re the matador-o.
U of Georgia
Last year had a winning orgy-a.
It was sweet
To be unbeat.