Can a Biography Fit in Four Lines? Only If the Rhymes Are Terrible
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A four-line comic verse about a named person, deliberately clumsy in metre and rhyme, was invented by a schoolboy in a chemistry lesson and named after his middle name.
The rules of the form
The form is short and its requirements are precise, which is what makes it a form rather than merely a joke. It has four lines rhyming in two pairs. The first line consists of, or ends with, the name of a person, and that person is the subject. The lines are of deliberately irregular length, frequently wildly so, and the metre is not merely loose but absent. The content should be biographical in some sense, though the biography may be entirely invented. And the whole thing should be funny, which is the requirement that cannot be specified.
Why the awkwardness is the point
The formal clumsiness is deliberate and does specific work:
- •A forced rhyme on a name is funnier than a smooth one
- •Irregular line length makes the reader stumble, which lands the joke
- •The contrast between a dignified subject and doggerel is the humour
- •Polishing the metre removes the effect entirely
- •The constraint is the name, and everything bends around it
- •A well-made one looks accidental
Where it came from
Edmund Clerihew Bentley was sixteen and sitting in a science lesson at St Paul's School in London in 1890 when he wrote the first one, about Humphry Davy, and the form took his middle name. He published a collection in 1905 with illustrations by his schoolfriend Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who also wrote them, and further collections followed. Bentley went on to write detective fiction, including a novel that is credited with changing the genre, and he is now remembered at least as much for the verse form invented in a chemistry lesson as for anything he wrote deliberately.
The related short forms
Several other compressed comic forms invite comparison and the differences are instructive. A limerick has five lines and a strict metre, and the humour comes from the metre being kept rather than broken. A double dactyl has a rigid two-stanza structure, an opening line of nonsense syllables, a proper name and a single six-syllable word, which is a far more demanding constraint. An epigram is a short pointed poem with no formal requirements beyond brevity. A higgledy-piggledy is another name for the double dactyl. The form discussed here is unusual in making formlessness the requirement rather than form.
Who else wrote them
The form attracted people who were doing something else for a living, which is part of its character. Chesterton wrote and illustrated them. W. H. Auden published a collection late in life. Clifton Fadiman and a number of other writers produced them. They became a standing feature of certain magazines and of the letters pages of scientific journals, where scientists compose them about other scientists, and there is a substantial body of them about chemists and physicists specifically. The form persists in competitions and in casual use, and its survival depends on it being easy to attempt and hard to do well.
The takeaway
Four lines rhyming in two pairs, with a person's name occupying or ending the first, deliberately irregular in length and free of metre, and biographical in content, make the form. The clumsiness is the joke, and smoothing the metre destroys it. Bentley wrote the first at sixteen during a science lesson in 1890, and the form carries his middle name.