Today’s Poem: Clerihews

E.C. Bentley / Oh, so intently / invented a rhyme scheme / while rowing a quinquereme.

The actor David Garrick, torn between the muses of comedy and tragedy, in a 1760 painting by Joshua Reynolds (Wikimedia Commons)

On Wednesdays here at

Poems Ancient and Modern

, we try to offer entries a little more airy, a little more comic. And why not? The tradition of light verse in English is long and deep, filled with entries by famous poets and talented little-knowns alike. The disdain for light verse among many contemporary poetry journals and book publishers is bizarre (given the high sales of rhymed and metered verse for children), and, worse, it contributes to the presentism that has forgotten the huge deposit of art that is English poetry.

So, this week, how about some clerihews? This is a silly poetic form invented by E.C. Bentley — Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) — when he was 16 years old and a student at St Paul’s School in London (alongside his friend, G.K. Chesterton, who would later help popularize the form). Here’s an example — which Bentley adapted from his first effort, written in a chemistry class:

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

In its essence, the clerihew is a four-line comic poem rhymed aabb. Strictly construed, the first line must end with someone’s name, with the joke of the poem involving the forcing of a rhyme with that name. The third and fourth lines typically (but not always) relate some genuine historical fact about the named person, again with an absurdly forced rhyme and an irregular number of feet, reminding the reader of how awkward the rhyme is.

E.C. Bentley, in a 1915 charcoal drawing by Hugh Goldwin Riviere (National Portrait Gallery)

E.C. Bentley is sadly neglected these days, in part because he was something of a literary butterfly: able to do almost anything with words but not willing to stick much to anything in particular. His light and genre-inverting detective novel Trent’s Last Case (1913) is always named in lists of classic whodunits, but it deserves to be much more widely read. (You can see how clever and difficult that light voice is when you compare it to, say, A.A. Milne’s weaker 1922 imitation, The Red House Mystery.) Bentley published his clerihews in three volumes: Biography for Beginners (1905), More Biography (1929), and Baseless Biography (1939), later collected in The Complete Clerihews.

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Clerihews

by E.C. Bentley

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

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

When their lordships asked Bacon
How many bribes he had taken
He had at least the grace
To get very red in the face.

John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote Principles of Economy.

What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead.

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Would never accept any fee
For singing The Wearing of the Green,
Accompanying himself on the tambourine.

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