Here's a humorous rhyming form we haven't tried, as far as I know. The novelist and humorist E.C. Bentley (1875-1956) invented it. The following is from Wikipedia:
A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. One of his best known is this (1905):
Sir Christopher Wren
Said "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's."
A clerihew has the following properties:
That's wordy, but it describes the form well. It's a sort of anti-limerick, because meter doesn't matter here, just rhyme. Let's try some, using famous people of our own time. Here are a few I whipped up:
Michele Bachmann
Hired a rock man
To play sadly
Since in Iowa she was beaten so badly.
Glenn Beck
Said, "What the heck?
I know what I know
And as soon as the sky falls I'm gonna run around telling everybody, "I told you so!"
Paris Hilton longed to say
She starred in a Shakespearean play
But the only role she got
Was that of a maid who polishes Richard III's chamber pot.
A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. One of his best known is this (1905):
Sir Christopher Wren
Said "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's."
A clerihew has the following properties:
- It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; it pokes fun at mostly famous people
- It has four lines of irregular length and metre (for comic effect)
- The rhyme structure is AABB; the subject matter and wording are often humorously contrived in order to achieve a rhyme, including the use of phrases in Latin, French and other non-English Languages.
- The first line contains, and may consist solely of, the subject's name.
That's wordy, but it describes the form well. It's a sort of anti-limerick, because meter doesn't matter here, just rhyme. Let's try some, using famous people of our own time. Here are a few I whipped up:
Michele Bachmann
Hired a rock man
To play sadly
Since in Iowa she was beaten so badly.
Glenn Beck
Said, "What the heck?
I know what I know
And as soon as the sky falls I'm gonna run around telling everybody, "I told you so!"
Paris Hilton longed to say
She starred in a Shakespearean play
But the only role she got
Was that of a maid who polishes Richard III's chamber pot.
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