Write a clerihew: a short comic or nonsensical verse, typically in two rhyming couplets with lines of unequal length and referring to a famous person.
The classic requirements, listed by the form’s creator Edmund Clerihew Bentley, were as follows (and were breached even by him, as you see in the examples below):
- Four lines
- Rhyming couplets of AA, BB
- A person’s name as its first line
- Something to say about that person
- And it should make you smile
Examples
Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered Sodium.
“I quite realised” said Columbus,
“That the Earth was not a rhombus
But I am a little annoyed
To find it an oblate spheroid”
Your turn!
John-Paul Flintoff
Reckoned he had the coronavirus though he hardly once felt the need to cough.
The worst thing was the ache in his bones, especially the pelvis,
But now he can wiggle his hips in self-isolation like Shakin’ Stevens.
(Sorry. I just felt like thwarting your expectations. You know who I meant to rhyme with.)
Galileo Gallilei
Wanted all the skies to see
He built the kit and in its zoom
He found the mountains of the moon
Hurrah! Love this.