Clerihew

Clerihews are funny poems you write about specific people (your parents, your boss, your favorite movie star, your best friend, your pet, or anyone else you can think of). Clerihews have just a few simple rules:

• They are four lines long.
• The first and second as well as the third and fourth lines rhyme with each other.
• The first line names a person, and the second line ends with something that rhymes with the name of the person.
• A clerihew should be humerous.

This form of poetry is named after its inventor Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) whose first collection of verse in Biography For Beginners (1905):


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

--Edmund Clerihew Bentley