Clerihews

The Clerihew is a form of comic verse invented by, and named after, Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1857-1956). It takes the form of two short, rhymed couplets. The first couplet should feature someone's name, to which is attached a rhyme, which ideally should be highly contrived and improbable; and which the second couplet then attempts to relate back to the subject. Collections of Bentley's original Clerihews usually include an extremely silly index.
   Many authors since Bentley's day have produced Clerihews. Here are a few of mine; mostly literary. I hope to add to them in due course.

John Steinbeck's family Joad
Should have taken a different road
They received only brutal kicks
Travelling on Route 66

Mahler's Fruits of the Earth
Had its premiere in Perth
But the audience of Diggers
Greeted it with sniggers

When Philip Larkin
Was booked for illegal parking
I thought it was pretty bad
That he tried to blame his mum and dad.

One Christmas, Jean-Paul Sartre
Was invited to visit Chartres
But he preferred to spend the festive season
Writing "A Critique of Dialectical Reason"

At a cricket match, George Orwell
Neglected to keep the score well
Though this earned him no reproof
From the Ministry of Truth

If you chance to see Shane Warne
Looking all shaven and shorn
He'll be wondering why he can't
Book for a new hair transplant

Adolf Hitler once read Joseph Heller
But he didn't think much of the fellah
He said there was no way Yossarian
Could ever have passed for an Aryan

Count Dracula (whose real name was Vlad)
Could be seen as completely mad
Since he took the decision to remain here
When he might have gone home to Romania

I doubt if Siegfried Sassoon
Felt exactly over the moon
When Robert Graves told him his letter*
Could have been written much better

(*Declaring his refusal to take any further part in the First World War)

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                      Index

Australians; philistine attitude of  -  Mahler
Christmas; Bah! Humbug!  -  Sartre
Combat; hors de  -  Sassoon
Criticism; literary  -  Heller, Sassoon
Follicles; lack of  -  Warne
F****d up  -  Larkin
Immigrant; undesirable  -  Dracula, Joad
Innumeracy  -  Orwell
Jagger, Mick; travel advice of; refuted  -  Joad
Point; missing the  -  Heller
Unreadability  -  Sartre
Windows, rose; failure to appreciate  -  Sartre
Wisden; unfitness for inclusion in  -  Orwell
Wrong 'un  -  Warne