clerihew

A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The lines are comically irregular in length, and the rhymes, often contrived, are structured AABB.

Structure and style

A clerihew has the following properties:

• It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; it pokes fun at mostly famous people
• It has four lines of irregular length (for comic effect); the third and fourth lines are usually longer than the first two
• The rhyme structure is AABB; the subject matter and wording are often humorously contrived in order to achieve a rhyme
• The first line consists solely (or almost solely) of the subject's name.

Clerihews are not satirical or abusive, but they target famous individuals and reposition them in an absurd or commonplace setting, often giving them an over-simplified and slightly garbled description (similar to the schoolboy style of 1066 and All That).

The unbalanced and unpolished poetic meter and line length parody the limerick, and the clerihew form also parodies the eulogy.

Practitioners

The form was invented by and is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley. As a 16-year-old student at St Paul's School in London, Bentley invented the clerihew on Humphry Davy (see below) when the lines came to his mind during a science class,^[1] and it was a great hit with his friends.^{[citation needed]} The first use of the word in print was in 1928.^[2] Clerihew published three volumes of his own clerihews, including Biography for Beginners (1905), which was published under the name "E. Clerihew".^[1]

Bentley's friend, G. K. Chesterton, was also a practitioner of the clerihew and one of the sources of its popularity. Chesterton provided the illustrations for Biography for Beginners.^[1] Other serious authors also produced clerihews, including W. H. Auden,^[3] and it remains a popular humorous form among other writers and the general public.

Examples

The first ever clerihew was written about Sir Humphry Davy:

Sir Humphry Davy

Was not fond of gravy.

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered sodium.^[4]

When this clerihew was published in 1905, "Was not fond of"^{[citation needed]} was replaced by "Abominated". Other classic clerihews by Bentley included:

George the Third

Ought never to have occurred.

One can only wonder

At so grotesque a blunder.^[5]

John Stuart Mill,

By a mighty effort of will,

Overcame his natural bonhomie

And wrote Principles of Political Economy.^[6]

In 1983, Games Magazine ran a contest titled "Do You Clerihew?" The winning entry was:

Did Descartes

Depart

With the thought

"Therefore I'm not"?

See also

• Double dactyl

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b c} Gale, Steven H. (1996). Encyclopedia of British Humorists: Geoffrey Chaucer to John Cleese, p. 139. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0824059905.
2. ^ Oxford English Dictionary
3. ^ O'Neill, Michael (2007). The All-sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry Since 1900, p. 94. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199299285.
4. ^ BBC - h2g2 - Sir Humphry Davy FRS (1778 - 1829)
5. ^ By Edmund Clerihew Bentley. Freeman, Morton S. (1997). A New Dictionary of Eponyms, p. 50. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195093542.
6. ^ By Edmund Clerihew Bentley, from Biography for Beginners. Swainson, Bill (ed.) (2000). Encarta Book of Quotations, pp. 642-43. Macmillan. ISBN 0312230001.

• Teague, Frances. "clerihew" in Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 219-220.