Clerihews
The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps.
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, 'I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's.'
John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote 'Principles of Political Economy.'
What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead.
Edward the Confessor
Slept under the dresser.
When that began to pall,
He slept in the hall.
Chapman & Hall
Swore not at all.
Mr Chapman's yea was yea,
And Mr Hall's nay was nay.
It was a weakness of Voltaire's
To forget to say his prayers,
And one which to his shame
He never overcame.
Commentary
from ‘Biography for Beginners’, 1905.
Not many poets can lay claim to inventing a poetic form; still fewer have had forms named after them. Lucky old ECB :-).
— Thomas
PS. Again, having such an odd middle name helps :-)
Biography
Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) is remembered mainly for his classic detective story Trent’s Last Case and for the verse form that was named after him - the clerihew. It was at the age of sixteen, while he was at St. Paul’s School in London, that Bentley first started writing clerihews, as a diversion from school work. G. K. Chesterton, Bentley’s life-long friend, was at St. Paul’s at the same time, and he too wrote clerihews.
Here is one of Bentley’s original clerihews from this period:
Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
Bentley’s first collection of verse in this vein was published in 1905 as Biography For Beginners. Further collections appeared in 1929 and in 1939. It was soon after publication of the first volume that the name ‘clerihew’ became applied to this particular form of light verse. What exactly is a clerihew? Frances Stillman in The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary defines it as ‘a humorous pseudo-biographical quatrain, rhymed as two couplets, with line of uneven length more or less in the rhythm of prose’. Add to this, that the name of the subject usually ends the first or, less often, the second line, and that the humour of the clerihew is whimsical rather than satiric, and there you have a complete definition.
– http://thinks.com/words/clerihew.htm
Show 3 commentsHide comments
From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Martin DeMello · 20 September 1999
And, of course, Bentley himself was not left unclerihewed:
Incidentally,
Mr. Bentley
Will someone write a Clerihew
When they bury you?
m.
Albert Melcher · 26 April 2000
Do you have the whole clerihew that Bentley wrote about Sir John Vanbrugh, the English architect,?
I think that the last two lines are something like this: “Lay heavy on him, Earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee”.
Thanks
Ablert G. Melcher
Demver Colorado
ianflanagan · 19 October 2005
Just found your site. I love clerihews - the form is addictive and much copied, but Bentley and Chesterton remain the masters. I have one of my own to offer, about the man himself:
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Poked fun, gently,
But could be terse
In his verse.