A Brief Tribute, Eventually in Verse

Here I've been droning on about some terribly important English poets, when just today the sun not only came out, but stayed. I know this because the room grew unusually warm while I was reading. Inspired by the abrupt arrival of Spring, I set down the George Eliot I was trying, and repaired to my shelves of poetry, in search of something more appropriate to the Season. Now, I might have picked up Wordsworth, always so good about this sort of thing, nature and the like, but instead I found myself drawn to something less profound, something lighter, brighter and if not better, certainly less taxing. I was in need of something silly. Of all the silliness ever to come out of England, and the English are a surprisingly silly people, bless 'em, there is no more delightfully useless form than that invented by the author of the classic mystery novel Trent's Last Case, Mr. E. C. Bentley. His mysteries aren't silly, actually his mysteries are superbly plotted, in the crackerjack style, and he is widely credited with having all but invented the modern mystery form. But about that, I don't much care. What I am very grateful for is the author's middle name.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley did that rarest of things in literature, he invented something new. The clerihew is is a four line poem, biographical in subject. The first and second lines rhyme, as do the third and fourth. The first line names the subject, and the second line ends with something that rhymes with the name. (In some cases, the person’s name comes at the end of the second line, in which case the first line rhymes with the name.) The lines can vary in length, they just have to rhyme. Bentley is said to have invented the form while a bored schoolboy. Here is his first acknowledged effort:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

Perhaps his most famous is as follows:

George the Third
Ought never have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

And then there is this:

John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote Principles of Political Economy.

I have too many favorites, drawn from Clerihews Complete. Here are just a few others:

What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
there is a great deal to be said
For being dead.

Geoffrey Chaucer
took a bath (in a saucer)
In consequence of certain hints
Dropped by the Black Prince.

The meaning of the poet Gay
Was always as clear as day,
While that of Blake
Was often practically opaque.

Bentley was the lifelong friend of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who occasionally illustrated Bentley's poems, and even wrote some clerinews himself, but of all those who have taken up the form since, I think my favorites are from Wystan Hugh Auden, who did a batch, in tribute to Ogden Nash, titled "Academic Graffiti." Here's the first:

My First Name, Wystan,
Rhymes with Tristan,
But -- O dear! -- I do hope
I'm not quite such a dope.

and just one more:

Robert Browning
Immediately stopped frowning
And started to blush,
When fawned on by Flush.

So, in celebration of this new Spring day, and in brief tribute to dear Edmund Clerihew Bentley and all the subsequent practitioners of his art, I offer the following:

EDMUND CLERIHEW BENTLEY

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
All but incidentally,
Invented the clerihew,
Which is considerably more than I could do.