On Wednesdays, the Poem of the Day feature tends to offer lighter verse for the Sun’s readers. And this week, we provide a small selection of clerihews by the creator of the comic form, E.C. Bentley — Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956). Invented by Bentley when he was 16 years old and a student at St Paul’s School in London (alongside his friend, G.K. Chesterton), the clerihew is a four-line comic poem rhymed aabb. The poems made their first public appearance in Bentley’s 1905 book Biography for Beginners. Though Bentley himself is not always precise about the form, a clerihew at its strictest requires a historical figure’s name in the first line and a claimed fact about that person in the second, typically rhyming with the name. The third and fourth line then twist the supposed biography to something comic.

Clerihews
by E.C. Bentley

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

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, ‘I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul’s.’

When their lordships asked Bacon
How many bribes he had taken
He had at least the grace
To get very red in the face.

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

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

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.