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Cleri Who's Who
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Four lines rhyming AABB - scansion, rhythm, metre and all that malarkey is as random as-u-like. Oh yes - the featured subject, usually a person, is mentioned in the first line.
Here's a full and frank(ly better) intro by Thos along with some that were made earlier.
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He'd never been to Micheldever.
Marcus Trescothick
Always travels with a lucky red brick
Presumably to assist his stonewall batting
Like, say, Mike Gatting.
Paul McDermott
Seems to get about a lot
While Paul Simon
Prefers rhymin'.
Antonio Stradivari
Probably didn't speak Polari
But Bartolomeo Guarneri
Sounded just like Julian Clary. String 'em up, I say
Robert Schumann
A genius, with failings all too human
Some of his works were destroyed by Brahms
A fact about which some people are up in arms.
Rudyard Kipling
Had muscles so rippling
That If he wrote
He'd rock the boat.
knew
She
Would dump you if she caught you kissing her best friend in Argos full on the lips, so don't even think of blaming me.
Sir Philip Sydney
Was shot at Zutphen (though not in the kidney)
"An Apology for Poetry," perhaps like this, was something he wrote
Whilst observing his favourite beast, the mountain goat. ".. ye goat-herd Gods that love the grassy mountains .." *sigh* they don't write them like that any more ..
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A died in the wool conservative? No, not on your nelly!
Atheist, freethinker and rebel
If the Library won't help then perhaps the Web'll.
[softers] dyed, dyed, dyed. One hundred times please :o)
Sorry, miss. Will you spank me? dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed, dyed. :-)
Lady Di ...pronounced "dye"
[softers] No. Don't ask again.
Didst die ...pronounced "dai"
In a Paris car crash ..pronounced "ker-ash"
Some might say that was a bit rash.
Galileo Galilei
Made a telescope with which to spy
While Nicolaus Copernicus
Caused a fuss.
The Artist Formerly Known as Prince
Has been silent since
He was asked to pronounce his new name
Since when he's never been quite the same
Dolly the sheep
Was rather surprisingly found to be philosophically deep
However, her sibling, also called Dolly
Said very little except for, "Oh golly!"
Little Bo Peep
May have inadvertantly started an urban legend by falling asleep
Of greater consequence is her ovine misplacement
Nevertheless, an otherwise disasterous situation was fortunately averted by the sheep's intrinsic capacity to reorient.
Tommy Steele
Nostalgic appeal (Softers) 'Ere, that don't rhyme.
[Rosie] I saw him in "Scrooge" at the Palladium last night, incidentally.
Not dead yet
His maker he's not met.
Terry Dean Whilst in nostalgia mode. [Rosie] mmm, it was a bit tricky, it does end in '-ent' :-)
When Googled gives 153,000 options to glean
My money's on the New Zealand rocker
I doubt he remembers Jarvis Cocker
Kingsley Amis
Yes - that's what his name is -
Has a brother
With whom he shares a mother
John Le Carré
used to go dancing at the Hammersmith Palais
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Choreographer
Now that the Cold War is over, his next book is rumoured to be about a geographer.
Rupert Sheldrake
Has resonantly morphed into a corncrake
Our collective memory won't let us forget him
And his belief that animals communicate through telepathy was memorably tested in The colour of magic when Rincewind and Twoflower impersonated chelonauts and were launched (closely followed by The Luggage) over the Disc's Rim
Christian author C.S.Lewis
Intended his work to be sung to music by Peter Brewis
However, his writings in moralistic parables using imaginary creatures from fantasy worlds
Endeared him, particularly in the North-East, to children sitting at home suffering from curlds. (y'knaa)
Roald Dahl
Wrote books with characters that would often snarl
Whereas Enid Blyton
Had famously five and secretly seven to write on.
George Orwell
Seemed to foretell
Reality telly
And farms being taken over by George Melly
Colin Sell
Contrary to popular belief, can play the piano rather well
While Liberace (cf)
To my untrained ear, sounds rather starchy
Saint Nicholas
Is traditionally greeted by a cry of, "Please tickle us!"
Whereas Saint Christopher
In his sheepskin, is "Mr Fur".
Good King Wenceslas
Felt cold, so he sent for 'is lass
She, as the Queen of Bohemia
,Made things somewhat steamier
George Frederick Handel
Wrote mostly by the light of a candle
But Benjamin Britten
Was with gaslight smitten
Edgar Allen Poe
Was only 40 when he had to go
Fifteen years older than his late wife Virginia
Who was 25, but you knew that didn'ya?
Harriet Beecher Stowe (continuing trinomiality)
Never hunted polar bears on an ice floe
Although the subtext of Uncle Tom's Cabin
Absolutely fascinated Premier Yitzhak Rabin.
Margaret Bleeding Thatcher . . . . and happy to continue yet further . . .
Ran so fast no one could catch her
While her embarassing non-identical twins
Raided Oddbins
Richard Milhous Nixon
Was married to an alcoholic vixen
Whereas James Earl Carter (irach) The founder of Fucks Fox News?
Married his next door neighbour, who certainly was less of a lush but not much smarter.
Dwight David Eisenhower
Wielded supreme executive power
So, alas, did Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili
Who ruled with a firm iron fist, albeit willy-nilly.
George MacDonald Fraser
Rarely went out without his Household Cavalry blazer
Quite unlike Norman Stanley Fletcher, old lag
Who never went out at all while he was banged up for a blag.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
A Yank, and Nobel Prize Laureate
Was,like William Butler Yeats,
A poet frequently called upon to open fêtes
William Topaz McGonagall
Wrote much deathless verse, such as his lament on the Tay Bridge disaster, which will never pall
whereas e e cummings
had all his teeth. removed without. Numbings.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Had he been born a couple of centuries later, would probably have ended his days as a minor celebrity who showed up in second-rate quiz shows on the telly.
As it was, he died in 1822
Which made Mary blue
Julius Henry Marx
Amused us with his larks
While George Bernard Shaw
Was rather more of a bore.
Jeremy John Durham Ashdown
Often pictured with a frown
Not becoming Prime Minister must have been a bit annoying
But he made up for the disappointment with his quasi-military envoying.
Simon Phillip Hugh Francis Neil Callow
Has achieved the unlikely feat of making reality TV even more shallow
In bold, obviously
Openly gay and acts the part
Wherever do his talents start?
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
Comitted buggery and was then reviled
He started his days within the Pale
But was later found guilty in a court of law, convicted, and sent to jail.
Harry S. Truman
Was human, all too human
He insisted the S was a name and shouldn't have a period after it, but wrote the period in his own signature himself
Perhaps this was a conscious attempt at irony, but he also ran the camp canteen at Ft. Still and it's entirely possible he just snitched one too many bottles off the shelf.
Jaramogi Oginga Odinga
Was the Octogenerian of Kenyan politics.
For African democracy, he was a key thinker ABAB then?
Although his sense of rhyme often went for six.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley why not?
Never treated scansion particularly gently
Rhyme and coherence, though, were the sine qua non
'Tis a pity we sometimes get it wrong. ;-)
Patrick Edmund Pery, the Earl of Limerick
Was considered by The Sun a big Tory stick
While Edward (middle name unknown) Lear, the original Limerick King
Was a much less political thing
Masaoka Shiki
May have been chosen for this clerihew because to the average Westerner, unversed in Japanese pronunciation, rhyming his surname doesn't seem too tricky
Unlike, say, the common Japanese name Kinoshita
Which apparently rhymes with Peter
U Thant
Has done something that many men can't
But apparently he only had one name
His other, Pantanaw, having been discarded when he achieved, as General Secretary of the United Nations, diplomatic fame
rab Is that allowable as the start of a clerihew?
Why not him at the start of clerhew; we'll take a stab
Of course, we can't promise anything stellar
But he is a remarkable feller.
Tuj Yes, it's allowable
Of whom we are all the judge
Now stands on trial
For casting a shadow, thereby blocking the public's ability to make use of the park sun-dial.
penelope curses, caught again
Likes to see how things developpy
Whereas flerdle
Prefers to let things curdle oblig, Nowt personal :o)
Chalky rolling on
Lost her doorkey
While she normally keeps it in a jar made of china,
The frail vessel cracked, and now the thing might be anywhere from Cannes to Carolina
Darren NO-ONE is safe
Once hiked the Kalahari, which as everyone knows, is very barren
Fortunately, the local tribesmen explained how water may be found
Underground
Rosie (in that case)
Has a cherished prize posession- a tatted Victorian tea cosy
He wears it on his head
While checking the weather from his shed.
Software
Dare
Says I Say, Potter!
Well, at least he oughtta. Dubious pronunciation to fit whether or not that was a typo
Bill Gates (Chalky) How did you know that?
Mates
But Steve Jobs' not the apple of his eye
You won't find Bill gently stroking Steve's thigh
The inscrutable irach - [Rosie] Just a hunch
Is undoubtedly aware of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac (Chalky) Actually I haven't got a hat of any kind. :-)
But the one he really feels for
Is the misshapen form of Patrick Moore.
Niels Bohr
Was rotten to the core
A singular view, it must be said
Since his study on the way electrons orbit around the atomic core to a Nobel Prize led!
Michael Faraday
Made it a point to frequent at least one bar a day
His consumption of the odd pork scratching
Kept his ideas of electromagnetism hatching.
Dorothy Leigh Sayers
Baked a cake of many layers
One for each circle of hell, in fact, which meant that it was kind of flimsy [irach] You should have shown up an hour sooner :-)
Her pastry concoctions being known for their allegoric connotations, and not for their whimsy
Dara O'Briain
Dreams of being Brendan Behan
Excepting, perhaps, the manner of his death
And alcohol tainted breath
Linus Pauling
Whose intake of vitamin C was quite appalling
Though he lived to be a great old age
Nuclear tests filled him full of rage
Romulus, brother of Remus
Said to Scotty, "To Rome will you beam us"
Or at least, that's what Babelfish translated it to from the original Latin
Which means it's about as likely that Mars' sons wanted to go to Manhattan actually, I wish babel DID do latin translations...
New York City
Big, loud, glitzy, fast, exciting but probably not pretty
Whereas San Francisco
Has only one disco.
Pablo Neruda
Used to rewrite Gabriel Garcia Marquez' limericks in order to make them cruder
Whereas Thomas Bowdler, hardly a writer
Removed the less moral parts of the human body in order to make it lighter
Greyfriars Bobby
Had to find an appropriate place in the graveyard to do a little jobby
But Jennings
Searched for pfennings.
Managing Director of the IMF, Rodrigo de Rato y Figaredo
Whirls in and out of the office like a tornado
While Director-General of the WHO, Dr. Lee Jong-Wook
Just pops in now and then to borrow a book
William Morris
Was very fond of young Doris
However she
Was far too young for some pervy old 19th Century designer who was just too old for she.
I appreciate that was rubbish, but I had to get it out of my system.
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