Clerihews
A clerihew is a four-line humorous verse about a well-known person. Here’s the original one, composed by Edmund Clerihew Bentley in 1891:
Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
They get pretty erudite, for some reason:
Sir Karl Popper
Perpetrated a whopper
When he boasted to the world that he and he alone
Had toppled Rudolf Carnap from his Vienna Circle throne.
(by Armand T. Ringer)
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.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lived upon venison;
Not cheap, I fear,
Because venison’s dear.
(credited to Louis Untermeyer)
George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.
The world’s densest clerihew was composed, over breakfast, by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, in honor of New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss. It manages to rhyme the names of three people in four lines:
To the Poetry Editor of the New Yorker
Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noel
Coward,
Howard?
