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 ch…