What Is a Clerihew?
Quick answer: A clerihew is a comic four line poem about a named person, rhymed AABB with cheerfully wonky metre. Meet E. C. Bentley's invention and write your own.
A clerihew is a comic poem of exactly four lines about a named person, usually a famous one, rhymed in two couplets, AABB, with metre that is deliberately, gloriously irregular. The subject's name traditionally ends the first line, which means the poet must immediately find a rhyme for it, and the fun of the form lives in how absurd that search becomes. The biographical claim the poem makes should be trivial, dubious or flatly invented; a clerihew that states accurate history has rather missed the point.
The form is named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who devised it as a bored teenager and could not have guessed it would outlive nearly everything else he wrote. Clerihews are sometimes dismissed as light verse, and they are light, but writing a good one is harder than it looks. You have four lines, one compulsory rhyme word chosen by history rather than by you, and a joke that must arrive precisely on the final syllable. Plenty of serious poets have tried and produced nothing but four limp lines and a famous name.
The poem
Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
E. C. Bentley, 'Biography for Beginners' (1905)
Invented out of boredom in a chemistry lesson
The story is well attested and almost too charming. Around 1890, a sixteen year old pupil at St Paul's School in London named Edmund Clerihew Bentley was sitting through a science class when four lines about the chemist Sir Humphry Davy drifted into his head. He wrote them down, his schoolfriends started producing their own, and a form was born in the back row. One of those schoolfriends was G. K. Chesterton, who would later illustrate Bentley's collections and write clerihews of his own.
Bentley published the first book of them, Biography for Beginners, in 1905 under the name E. Clerihew, and the poems became a minor craze. He went on to a distinguished career as a journalist and wrote Trent's Last Case, a landmark detective novel, yet his middle name became a common noun, an honour granted to very few. The original Davy verse remains the form's founding document, and it demonstrates every rule at once.
The rules of the clerihew
For a comic form, the clerihew is surprisingly strict about some things and surprisingly relaxed about others. The strictness all concerns structure; the relaxation all concerns sense, accuracy and dignity, which the form treats as optional at best.
The metre deserves special mention because it confuses newcomers. Lines can be any length, and the clumsier the mismatch between them, the better. A clerihew scanning smoothly is like a clown in a well-fitted suit: technically impressive and completely wrong for the job.
Why the wobbly metre is actually craft
In most poetry, awkwardness is a flaw to revise away. In the clerihew it is the engine. The lopsided lines create a deadpan effect, as if an earnest but incompetent biographer were doing their honest best, and the reader laughs at the gap between the solemn biographical manner and the collapsing verse that delivers it. Bentley rhyming Davy with gravy, then stretching his fourth line to accommodate the entire discovery of sodium, is comic timing performed through line length.
The rhymes work the same way. The best clerihew rhymes are audacious, polysyllabic and slightly desperate: odium with sodium, a surname forced into partnership with a word no dignified poem would touch. Because the subject's name is fixed, the rhyme hunt is a genuine constraint, and readers can feel the poet wriggling inside it. That visible wriggle is the charm. A clerihew should look easy and be difficult, like most good jokes.
A worked example, step by step
Watch the process on an original example written for this page. Step one: choose a subject whose name offers rhyming trouble, say Emily Dickinson. Step two: list rhymes and near-rhymes for the name; for Dickinson you might scribble in, thin, kin, listen in. Step three: recall one famous fact, then bend it toward absurdity. Dickinson rarely received visitors, which is promising material.
The result: Emily Dickinson / Rarely let visitors in. / She preferred, on the whole, / The company of her soul. Notice the mechanics: the name lands its rhyme immediately, the second couplet swerves from biography into cod-philosophy, and the fourth line is shorter than the reader expects, which is where the smile happens. It is affectionate rather than mocking, and it would take about four seconds to read at a party, which is roughly the form's natural habitat.
Now try the same three steps with a different figure: a scientist, a footballer, a composer. You will discover that step two, the rhyme list, decides everything. Subjects whose names rhyme with nothing force the enjambed cheat where the name sits mid-line, which purists frown at but Bentley himself occasionally allowed.
Clerihew versus limerick
The clerihew's obvious rival in comic verse is the limerick, and people regularly confuse them. They are opposites in almost every way that matters, and knowing the differences sharpens your sense of what each form is for.
The deepest difference is metrical. The limerick has one of the strictest bounce patterns in English verse, an anapaestic gallop that everyone can hear, while the clerihew forbids exactly that regularity. One form is a drumbeat, the other a pratfall.
Writing your own without drawing blood
Clerihews about historical figures are the safest and often the funniest, because time has made their dignity fair game: nobody's feelings are hurt by a joke about Napoleon's height or Wordsworth's walking habit. Living subjects call for a lighter touch. The form's tradition is teasing, not takedown; the moment a clerihew turns genuinely cruel it stops being a clerihew in spirit and becomes a mean tweet with a rhyme scheme.
They make superb warm-up exercises before serious writing sessions, and teachers use them because a class can produce twenty in half an hour, each one teaching rhyme, compression and comic timing painlessly. Try writing one about a poet you have been studying; distilling a life into a four line joke forces you to decide what that person is actually known for, which is a sneaky act of criticism. Keep the ones that make someone else laugh out loud and delete the rest without mercy.
What poets can take from this
- Pick your subject by rhyming potential first; a name with no rhymes means a poem with no ending.
- Write the rhyme list before the poem, including shameless near-rhymes and polysyllabic stretches.
- Let your line lengths mismatch; if the verse scans smoothly you have accidentally written something else.
- Save the joke for the last line, ideally the last word.
- Keep it affectionate; the clerihew winks at its subject rather than wounding them.
- Test it aloud on one listener, because a clerihew is social verse and dies in silence.
Try it yourself
Write three clerihews about three writers you have actually read, one historical, one living, one you dislike, and notice which of the three is hardest to keep affectionate.
Questions
Does a clerihew have to be about a real person?
By tradition, yes, and the name should be recognisable enough for the joke to land. Fictional characters and personal friends can work at a stretch, but the classic clerihew trades on public reputation, which is why scientists, poets and politicians dominate the form.
Does a clerihew have a syllable count or set metre?
No, and that is the point. Lines may be any length, and an awkward mismatch between them is part of the comedy. The only fixed requirements are the four lines, the AABB rhyme scheme and the named subject.
Who wrote the first clerihew?
Edmund Clerihew Bentley, as a schoolboy at St Paul's School in London around 1890. His verse about Sir Humphry Davy is generally counted as the first, and his 1905 collection Biography for Beginners established the form and gave it his middle name.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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