The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

The CLERIHEW is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, father of Nicolas, that peerless illustrator who always signed his work ‘Nicolas Bentley Drew the pictures’. The rules state that clerihews be non-metrically written in two couplets, the first of which is to be a proper name and nothing else. The best-known originals include:Christopher WrenSaid ‘I am going to dine with some men,‘If anyone callsSay I am designing St Paul’s.’Sir Humphrey DavyAbominated gravy.He lived in the odiumOf having discovered sodium.John Stuart Mill,By a mighty effort of will,Overcame his natural bonhomieAnd wrote ‘Principles of Economy’.

Metrical clumsiness is very much a desideratum; indeed, it is considered extremely bad form for a clerihew to scan. Properly done, they should tell some biographical truth, obvious or otherwise, about their subject, rather than be sheer nonsense. Sir Humphrey’s dislike of gravy, for example, may well be whimsical tosh, but he did discover sodium: I have tried to cleave to this requirement in my clerihews on the poets. Clerihews have therefore some utility as biographical mnemonics.

THE LIMERICKThere was a middle-aged writer called FryWhose book on verse was a lie.For The Ode Less TravelledSoon unravelledTo reveal some serious errors in its scansion and rhy…

Unlike clerihews, LIMERICKS, as we discovered when considering their true metrical nature (we decided they were anapaestic, if you recall), do and must scan. I am sure you need to be told little else about them. The name is said to come from a boozy tavern chorus ‘Will you come up to Limerick?’. Although they are popularly associated with Edward Lear, anonymous verses in the ‘There was an old woman of…’ formulation pre-dated him by many years:A merry old man of Oporto,Had long had the gout in his fore-toe;And oft when he spokeTo relate a good joke,A terrible twinge cut it short-O.Said a very proud Farmer at Reigate,When the Squire rode up to his high gate

‘With your horse and your hound,You had better go round,For, I say, you shan’t jump over my gate.’

That pair was accompanied by Cruikshank illustrations in a children’s ‘chap-book’ of around 1820 when Lear was just eight or nine years old. Oddly, these examples accord more closely to the modern sense of what a limerick should be than Lear’s own effusions, in which the last line often lamely repeats the first.There was an Old Man of the West,Who wore a pale plum-coloured vest;When they said, ‘Does it fit?’He replied, ‘Not a bit!’That uneasy Old Man of the West.

Rather flat to the modern ear, I find. We prefer a punchline:Girls who frequent picture palacesSet no store by psychoanalysis.And although Sigmund FreudWould be greatly annoyed,They cling to their long-standing fallacies.

Or phalluses, ho-ho-ho. It was W. S. Baring-Gould’s collection The Lure of the Limerick that really understood the base (in both senses) nature of the form. I remember owning a Panther Books edition (an imprint known for publishing risqué but classy works, Genet and the like) and finding their scabrous and cloacal nature hilarious, as any unhealthy ten-year-old would. This anonymous (so far as I can tell) limerick puts it well:The limerick packs laughs anatomicalInto space that is quite economical.But the good ones I’ve seenSo seldom are cleanAnd the clean ones so seldom are comical.

When I began collecting the works of Norman Douglas I was delighted to find a copy of his 1928 anthology, Some Limericks, which remains deeply shocking to this day. Most of them are simply disgusting. Hard to believe that an antiquarian belle-lettriste like Douglas (you may remember his ‘Wagtail’ anacreontics) would dare risk attaching his name to them at a time when Ulysses was being impounded by customs officers on both sides of the Atlantic. Please do not read these four examples of Douglas’s literary excavations. Skip to the next paragraph instead.There was an old fellow of Brest,Who sucked off his wife with a zest.Despite her great yowlsHe sucked out her bowelsAnd spat them all over her chest.There was a young man of NantucketWhose prick was so long he could suck itHe said, with a grinAs he wiped off his chin:‘If my ear were a cunt, I could fuck it.’There was an old man of Corfu,Who fed upon cunt-juice and spew.When he couldn’t get this,He fed upon piss–And a bloody good substitute too.There was an old man of Brienz,The length of whose cock was immense.With one swerve he could plugA boy’s bottom in ZugAnd a kitchen-maid’s cunt in Koblenz.

Reflections on Comic and Impolite Verse