" Fairy Tales do not tell children that Dragons exist. Children already know that Dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed." --G.K. Chesterton


I quoted him a bunch of posts back. And I liked the quote so much I decided to get to know him better. Now I’m just getting into his Book Orthodoxy…partly cause Graham Greene called it “among the great books of the age” and because I left the other book I was reading on the train. He wrote the Father Brown Detective stories, but next I’m going straight to the novel that seems to be considered one of his major works--The Man who was Thursday.

In reading about Chesterton, I came upon The Clerihew. It was invented by Chesterton’s friend, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. and Chesterton wrote a bunch of them.

A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem
and has the following properties:

It is biographical and usually whimsical
It pokes fun at mostly famous people
It has four lines of irregular length and metre
The rhyme structure is AABB
The first line contains, and may consist solely of, the subject's name.
.

For example: A clerihew regarding the inventor of the thermos bottle (or Dewar flask):

Sir James Dewar
Is smarter than you are
None of you asses
Can liquify gases.

A modern literary example is:

Ted Hughes,
Sylvia's muse,
was rather good-looking.
Let his wife do the cooking.

In 1983, Games Magazine ran a contest titled "Do You Clerihew?" The winning entry was:

Did Descartes
Depart
With the thought
"Therefore I'm not"?

Looked a lot easier than the Limerick, so I took a crack at it:

Carmelo
much like Jello
Colorful-- full of shimmer
As sustenance? Not a winner.

It’s frontrunner Romney
Who’s Playing the Zombie
In the latest B horror flick
Called Our Bloody Body Politic

There was ring great Henry Armstrong
Moon man Neil, then juiced up Lance pedaled along
But for me it’s just ‘natch
To think only of Satch.

Barack FYI
Is just one guy
And though maybe anomalous
Even Remus had his Romulus


Jim Watson and his lab partner Crick
Were asking themselves “ What’s the trick?”
Then Watson flicked his wrist to see what was the time
“It’s a twist!” Crick cried, “How sublime.”


One more G.K…

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."