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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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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
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