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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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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
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