The clarihew is a four-line poem named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, with an AABB rhyme scheme and a jocular remark about a person. The second couplet can also make a critical observation. The form was popularized in 1905 by Bentley’s collection of poems, Biography for Beginners. It is related to other biographical poems, such as the balliol and double dactylic.
The diminutive poem clarihew entered popular culture in Britain around the turn of the 20th century. Named after the British writer Edmund Clerihew Bentley, the rules governing these four-line poems are basic and accessible to a wide audience of poets and poetry lovers. Following an AABB pattern, with the endings of the first two and last two lines rhyming, these poems are generally a jocular remark about a particular person or type of person. Reflecting this biographical format, the end of the first line is usually where that person’s name appears, with the punchline coming somewhere in the second set of lines.
While the formation and purpose of clerihew is quite rigid, the amount of possible syllables is boundless. The first two lines could be “Backstreet Boys/Plastic Toys”. They could also be much more involved like “Acting legend Pauly Shore/He’s no longer known to work.” While the main joke is generally made in the second couplet of the clarihew, more than an amusing remark is possible just by making a sharp characterization.
The second part of the poem can therefore be directed towards making the critical observation of the subject. In the examples above, this might mean writing “Backstreet Boys/Plastic toys/They once made tears of joy/They flow even as kids.” Pauly Shore’s example might end: “He was last seen in party gear / I was rolling for another year.”
While it is unclear whether he founded the form, British humor writer Edmund Clerihew Bentley is credited with popularizing this type of poetry. His first collection of poems, 1905’s Biography for Beginners, contained the earliest recognized versions. Among the first was: “Sir Humphrey Davy / Abominated gravy. / He lived in hate / That he discovered sodium.” While these poems most often addressed a particular character, it would not be unusual to write a cleric about one type of person. For example, “The wise lawyer,/Law’s sad stretcher/Do justice/Just to dust ourselves off”.
Clerihew is a close relative of a few other biopics. The closest relationship is the nursery rhyme balliol, which has the prerequisite of naming the subject in the first line but also follows a more demanding metre. A double dactylic poem follows the same biographical mission but uses two four-line stanzas. The subject is named in the second of the eight lines of this type of poem, and the last word of each four-line stanza are the only two parts that need to rhyme. A final condition is that somewhere between the fifth and seventh lines, only an often obscure and doubly dactylic word, such as “antedeluvian”.
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