MADAME MATISSE
Mrs Matisse or Amélie
dearly loved wife of henri
A portrait-not still life
his espouse or trouble&strife
CDF -Caspar David Friedrich
an artist so enigmatically slick
His pics use the compositional device Rückenfigur *
positioned as a foreground poseur
(*a figure seen entirely from behind)
Lewis Carroll
wrote of a rabbit in formal apparel.
Charles Dodgson, on the other hand,
wrote on logic - all so hard to understand.
1.Gertrude Jekyll
garden artist
Showers
of silhouettes,
rookery in the rain-
Springtime just around the corner
Again
2.Gertrude Stein
Poet Gertrude Stein
had a staccato style quite fine
She also became a Cubist
& with prose poetry for a while did persist
HOGATH
Shrimp girl
another arrow to his quiver
hogarth's lass near the river
Witty Will from London town
With his art acted the clown
They said he could not paint flesh or blood-
His 'Shrimp Girl' disproves this lie
When he gave portraiture a try.
Tribute-William Hogarth 1687-1764
C.S Lewis, brilliant 20th century scholar -
even though he wore no clerical collar
he spread morality on the BBC
ever since converting to Christianity
The beau idéal of art commemorates Frida Kahlo's
Habitual self-portraits donning Mexican dahlia halos
Worshiped feminist by LGBTQ & Chicano cult artsy
Wife of master mural painter both activists in leftist party
Self taught was Samuel Shelley
maybe he loved the bee's royal jelly
Founder of the Water Colour society
& a famous miniaturist was he
DEGAS DELIGHTFUL DAMES
Edgar Degas did not mingle
so shy he remained single
His art self contained & absorbed
perfect though expensive 'daubs'
Dancers everywhere
to pose on toes
& as art lover knows
PAINTING After wise words of Degas
so,so easy to do..
when we don't know how,
so,so true..but
so,so dificile..
when we do!
Sunday fellowship
Henri Le Sidaner's 'Le Dimanche
so ' typique 'of a muted Symboliste branch
Dreamy, Sunday, atmospheric date
a tranquil imagination in quintuplicate
Le Dimanche (Sunday) by Henri Le Sidaner
usually set aside by faithful for prayer
Here in his imagination
lovely ladies of delightful a 'cinquation'
Margaret Macdonald becoming CRMac's wife
led an active artistic life
Together made many a design
of floral motifs so fine
Edmond-François Aman-Jean
we're within his symbolist dream
Renewal & awakening it's said to mean
to me ..a beauty arrives on.the scene
Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff
avant-garde art he love quite a lot
Pastel dream lady-like was his thing
in Memories' the tennis scene a novel swing
Tribute to William Soutar 1898-1943
A Perthshire Lad William Soutar
William S* showed a poetic voice
the quatrain form,his choice
he named a whigmaleerie
became a lasting legacy
Wiliam Soutar famed for his 119 American cinquains(which he labelled epigrams) also wrote whigmaleeries for children .
In dialect and lyric William’s
poetry soon found fame.
Whims and fanciful notions
these whigmaleerie were known.
Less popular yet, equally unique
verse in English, oh so terse. This
genre , American cinquain consolidated
a reputation,once again.
Grew to manhood on the river Tay,
Writing poems ,most every day;
Cinquains,epigrams, whigmaleerie-
& His diary of a dying man,left
Telling observations, for all to see.
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick:
Canadians believe he deserves a good buttkick.
The failed trade deal? We did not "blow it up".
Negotiate in good faith or suck it up, buttercup!
Introduction
The quickest pleasure often arrives when a dignified name collides with an undignified circumstance. A public identity may carry expectations of brilliance, authority, glamour, or solemnity; the poem briefly tilts that identity until an overlooked appetite, mishap, complaint, or eccentricity takes center stage. Because the space is so compressed, every sound and detail participates in the joke. The result can feel at once like a miniature portrait, a verbal cartoon, and an affectionate act of imaginative mischief.
Reading these poems side by side reveals how differently writers handle that mischief. One poet may build from an awkward name rhyme, while another begins with a plausible biographical detail and lets it drift toward nonsense. Some voices sound ceremonious, making the absurdity sharper; others use conversational phrasing, mock seriousness, or childlike logic. Subjects may come from public life, science, art, entertainment, history, school, family lore, or fiction. Tone also varies: a poem can tease gently, celebrate through exaggeration, or expose a harmless contradiction without turning cruel.
Browse the poems in this collection as a gallery rather than stopping after the first laugh. A single example demonstrates one solution, but several reveal the form's real creative range: how a difficult name can generate an entire scenario, how uneven pacing can become comic timing, and how the final sound can either complete the premise or transform it. Comparing community poems also sharpens judgment. You begin to hear which rhymes feel inevitable, which absurdities remain connected to the subject, and which endings leave a memorable afterimage rather than merely closing the pattern.
Reading Guide
Read a clerihew not only to discover whether it is funny, but to observe how the humor has been engineered. Its compactness places unusual pressure on selection: the poet must establish a recognizable subject, invent a slanted perspective, control awkward or surprising sounds, and reach a satisfying close before the premise wears out. As you read the community poems, compare the route each writer takes from public identity to private absurdity. The most revealing differences often lie in timing, tone, and the relationship between the rhyme and the imagined incident.
- The angle of entry: Notice what aspect of the subject becomes the poem's doorway: a profession, reputation, physical detail, habit, invention, or wholly imagined problem. The angle determines whether the comedy feels personal and specific or interchangeable. Ask: could this premise belong only to this subject, or could any name be substituted?
- The sound of the name: Listen to how the subject's name shapes the poem's vocabulary and direction. An inconvenient sound can provoke inventive diction, while an easy rhyme may tempt the poet toward a familiar joke. When comparing poems, ask whether the sonic challenge generated the comic situation or merely decorated it.
- The management of pace: Observe where a line rushes, stalls, or expands beyond expectation. Uneven phrasing can mimic hesitation, pomposity, surprise, or a breathless explanation. Read aloud and ask: does the altered pace sharpen the joke, or does it sound accidental and difficult to follow?
- The tonal distance: Consider whether the speaker sounds affectionate, deadpan, mock-scholarly, bewildered, admiring, or mildly irreverent. Tone matters because absurdity can become harsh if the speaker appears to prosecute rather than play. Ask which poem makes room for laughter without reducing its subject to a target.
- The chosen detail: Look for concrete objects, actions, places, or specialized words. One exact detail can make nonsense feel strangely credible; vague praise or ridicule rarely has the same force. Ask: what image remains after reading, and how does it connect the recognizable person to the invented predicament?
- The closing maneuver: Notice whether the final phrase confirms the premise, escalates it, reverses it, or supplies a mock explanation. Closure carries disproportionate weight in such a brief poem. Compare several endings and ask: does the last sound merely satisfy anticipation, or does the final idea make the entire portrait funnier in retrospect?
Read beyond the first example, preferably aloud. Comparison helps separate instant novelty from durable craft and shows how voice, sound, and comic logic can produce markedly different portraits within the same shared conventions.
Writing Tips
Begin with a person and a comic possibility, not with a bare rhyme scheme waiting to be filled. In workshop, the strongest drafts usually have an underlying sentence that can be stated plainly: this person is unexpectedly troubled by, obsessed with, mistaken for, or responsible for something. That relation gives the poem a center of gravity. Rhyme and irregular pacing can then distort the premise productively instead of dragging the subject through unrelated statements.
- Choose a subject with available tension. Look for a contrast between public reputation and imaginable private inconvenience: grandeur versus fussiness, expertise versus confusion, elegance versus an awkward object. A recognizable trait gives readers a foothold, but the poem needs a fresh deviation from it. If the only impulse is that the name happens to rhyme, keep looking for a human or conceptual contradiction.
- Build a sound bank before drafting. Say the name repeatedly and list exact rhymes, near rhymes, split phrases, unusual vocabulary, and words with related consonants or vowels. Do not commit immediately to the first obvious pairing. The best sound may suggest an action or setting that creates a coherent miniature story, whereas the easiest rhyme may lead to a predictable compliment or insult.
- Let awkwardness become timing, not clutter. A stretched or abruptly shortened phrase can be funny because it delays an expected sound or makes the speaker appear excessively earnest. Yet accidental tangles merely slow comprehension. Decide where the reader should pause, where the explanation should tumble forward, and where a conspicuous verbal bump adds comic character.
- Prefer one developed absurdity to several random ones. Brevity can tempt writers to pile up disconnected oddities. Instead, allow each statement to cause, explain, or intensify the next. Even nonsense benefits from local logic: if the premise is impossible, the consequences should feel delightfully faithful to that impossibility.
- Use exact images as anchors. Give the subject something to touch, eat, misplace, invent, fear, or misunderstand. A precise object turns a verbal joke into a scene and helps readers visualize the unusual perspective. Specialized language can be effective when it illuminates the subject, but jargon included only for rhyme often announces the machinery too loudly.
- Control the degree of teasing. Aim for disproportion, incongruity, or mock solemnity rather than contempt. Ask what the poem invites readers to laugh at: a harmless fictional predicament, an inflated reputation, the speaker's reasoning, or the contortions of language itself. When the target is vulnerability rather than pretension, the lightness can collapse.
- Keep formal compliance subordinate to speech. A technically convenient word is not automatically the right word. Rearranged syntax, filler phrases, and unexplained references can make the poem feel assembled backward from its end sounds. Preserve the sensation that a distinctive speaker is telling this particular anecdote, even when the diction becomes extravagantly improbable.
- Make the ending perform more than closure. The final phrase should complete an image, reveal a consequence, or reframe the subject's identity. Avoid explaining why the preceding lines are funny. A concise last turn allows readers to make the connection themselves and often leaves a stronger comic echo.
During revision, read the draft aloud twice: first at a natural conversational pace, then with the pauses the lineation seems to demand. Mark every place where syntax forces emphasis onto an unimportant word. Test the poem on a reader who recognizes the subject and ask what image, not merely what rhyme, remains. Replace filler, clarify the miniature chain of cause and effect, and check that the ending arrives with surprise while still feeling prepared by everything before it.
Interesting Facts
- A name can function as a plot generator. Its sounds may lead toward an occupation, object, place, or action the poet would never have selected by ordinary association. The challenge is to make that accidental discovery seem retrospectively perfect for the subject rather than merely convenient.
- Unevenness can create several kinds of humor. A long explanation may make the speaker sound pompous or desperate, while a sudden short statement can land with deadpan force. The same pacing freedom can therefore produce rambling comedy, abrupt surprise, or a deliberately awkward social voice.
- Biographical truth is less important than recognizable connection. An invented incident can feel apt when it plays against a known profession, reputation, or trait. Total randomness may earn a quick laugh, but a specific relationship between person and predicament gives the portrait greater staying power.
- A difficult rhyme can improve the poem. Resistance forces the writer away from stock vocabulary and toward stranger, more concrete possibilities. It can also harm the poem if distorted syntax or obscure diction becomes the main event. Readers remember ingenuity most when it remains easy to hear.
- Gentleness requires precision. Broad ridicule is easy; affectionate absurdity is more demanding. A carefully chosen inconvenience, exaggerated concern, or mock-heroic response can reveal a comic contradiction without asking the reader to despise the person being portrayed.
- Sequence changes the reading experience. One poem offers a quick verbal cartoon, but several can become a gallery of public personas and comic voices. As you browse the community poems, notice how repeated conventions make small differences in diction, timing, logic, and tonal warmth increasingly visible.
Popular Themes
Subject matter matters here because the comedy depends on a gap between what readers expect of a person and what the poem imagines instead. The following themes are literary possibilities, not statistical popularity rankings. Each offers recognizable material that can be compressed, tilted, and given a mock-biographical consequence.
- Scientists and inventors: Technical achievement can be contrasted with an ordinary nuisance, a misunderstanding, or an absurd side effect. Specialized terms also provide vivid sound and imagery when used clearly rather than as decorative jargon.
- Writers and artists: A familiar work, style, medium, or public reputation can become the basis for a compact imaginative predicament. The poem may let the artist be inconvenienced by the very thing associated with their fame.
- Leaders and public figures: Ceremony, authority, and self-importance invite comic deflation through mundane objects or domestic concerns. The approach works best when it exposes disproportion without becoming a political attack or a catalogue of grievances.
- Teachers and school personalities: Subjects known for rules, subjects, sayings, or classroom habits offer immediate points of recognition. A tiny reversal, such as the expert becoming confused by a simple task, can create a complete comic arc.
- Entertainers and fictional characters: Established personas give poets traits to exaggerate or redirect. A singer, actor, hero, or cartoon figure can be placed in a situation where performance and private behavior collide.
- Friends, relatives, and local characters: Shared knowledge can make a small habit feel richly biographical. Writers should supply enough detail for an outside reader to enjoy the scene, rather than relying entirely on an in-joke.
- Holiday and seasonal figures: Familiar costumes, duties, foods, and rituals create ready-made expectations. An unexpected logistical problem or personal preference can turn ceremonial imagery into playful absurdity.
- The self as subject: A self-portrait permits comic distance from one's own reputation, ambitions, or habits. Treating oneself as a public character can produce a voice that is both mock-important and disarmingly candid.
As you read the community poems, compare several treatments of similar subjects. Notice how one writer builds from reputation, another from sound, and another from a concrete object or imagined mishap. Shared material does not require shared results; the revealing difference is the angle each poet chooses and the tone used to sustain it.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension lies between recognition and surprise. Readers need enough of the subject's identity to understand why the imagined situation is apt, yet the poem loses energy if it merely repeats a familiar fact or joke. A memorable clerihew makes the person recognizable and newly strange at the same time. It does not offer a complete life; it finds one disproportionate detail or invented incident that acts as a comic lens. Through that lens, reputation becomes personality, and personality becomes a miniature drama.
Structure feels necessary when every pressure contributes to that drama. The opening prominence of the name creates sonic expectation and places the public persona under immediate scrutiny. Variable pacing can then imitate a speaker improvising an explanation, struggling toward decorum, or rushing past an embarrassment. Rhyme is most effective when it appears to discover the incident rather than dictate it. A surprising word may enlarge the scene, but a word present solely because it fits the sound exposes the scaffold. Strong poems make constraint and imagination seem to have arrived together.
Editors and attentive readers listen for economy without thinness. The poem needs a premise, movement, and consequence, even within its small compass. Common weaknesses include predictable associations, mechanical end sounds, filler syntax, and strained phrasing that no believable speaker would use. Other drafts over-explain the punchline or introduce several unrelated absurdities instead of developing one. Insufficient development does not mean the poem needs more background; it means the available statements do not build on one another. A compact poem can still imply cause, escalation, and aftermath.
Individuality remains visible through the choice of subject, the degree of nonsense, the speaker's social manner, the precision of imagery, and the ethical temperature of the joke. One poet may favor dry understatement; another may use exuberant wordplay, mock scholarship, or elaborate politeness. Some endings click shut, while others leave a final absurd image hovering. Comparing multiple community poems develops a more reliable sense of quality because the shared conventions become a control: readers can see which choices are inherited from the form and which belong to the poet. The finest examples do not merely solve a rhyme problem. They make that problem reveal an angle on character that feels both improbable and oddly fitting.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before deciding what the form can do. Compare how different writers turn a name, reputation, profession, or familiar trait into a compact comic predicament, and listen for the choices that shape tone and timing. When a poem stays with you, leave a thoughtful comment about the image, turn, rhyme, or voice that made it effective.
Then try your own portrait. Choose a subject whose public identity offers room for affectionate surprise, revise until the language sounds spoken rather than forced, and publish the result on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can join the ongoing conversation between shared convention and individual comic imagination.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 862 Clerihew poems, providing ample opportunity to compare subjects, comic angles, voices, pacing choices, and approaches to closure. A collection of this size can show how poets work differently under recognizable constraints: some may follow the conventions closely, while others adapt or challenge them. Reading across multiple entries helps visitors distinguish the form's durable identity from the imaginative decisions that give each poem its own character.
Clerihew Categories
Read wonderful clerihew poetry on the following sub-topics:
celebrities, christmas, fame, friends, funny, kids, love, nature, school, spongebob, trump
and more.
Definition | What is Clerihew in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.