A Wish to Comply

Did I see it go by,
That Millikan mote?
Well, I said that I did.
I made a good try.
But I'm no one to quote.
If I have a defect
It's a wish to comply
And see as I'm bid.
I rather suspect
All I saw was the lid
Going over my eye.
I honestly think
All I saw was a wink.

Robert Frost

Golias--

Thomas Hood
Is really pretty good.
But compared to the greatest Thomas
He merely shows promise.

I like the Bridge of Sighs well enough, but comparable to Lizbie Browne?? (Well, as my old friend Henri Coulette used to say, That's horse racing.)

Terese--
Since my only claim to fame is as a clerihewist (and I modestly think I'm the best since Chesterton & Bentley),
I feel compelled to say, 1) that your clerihews shouldn't
be confined to dimeter--much of the fun of the form depends on the free lines, though of course they have to sound right; 2) the trouble with your samples is that they are not funny enough; and 3) the rhymes need to be funnier, AND
they must be exact, not merely close, AND they can't seem strained for, as some of yours do seem to be. I'll copy out six of my voluminous production, the six I think the best
and funniest, as examples of what I mean:

Charles Bukowski
Could never find his housekey,
But being a total souse
He was lucky just to find his house.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Was a very strange crietzsche:
He dreamt of mounting a little wench
And screamaing, "Ubermensch!"

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Had more on his mind than his belly.
One can only take pity on
The author of Epipsychidion.

John Dryden
Never looked for a hole to hide in.
Did he run away from MacFlecknoe?
Heck, no.'

Oscar Wilde
Was most unjustly reviled:
Merely for loving his neighbor
He got two years' hard labor.

Johann Sebastian Bach
At 2 a.m. sighed, "Ach,
Bring me some coffee, I gotta
Finish a cantata."

(Well, I can't resist--one more.)

Marianne Moore
Was prim and rather dour,
Not at all the sort of poetess
You might interest in coitus.


Now, you don't have to like them, but they are very good
specimens of the form.

Robert

Your clerihews made me laugh! They're excellent.

I've written clerihews in other meters as well. Thanks for the pointers: I'll probably return to the form again at some point.

Others have said they found the Rasputin, the O'Hara, and the Lorca/Dali clerihews, in particular, amusing...I'm sorry you didn't. Everyone's sense of humor is so individual.

Terese

Auden was a good clerihewist, but Robert is a great one! I think the trick is to come up with rhymes which are as unpredictable as they are inevitable. Let me demonstrate that inevitability with a good story. Alfred Nicol was driving Rhina and me back from a reading I'd given, and we fell to clerihewing. I quoted

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
was a modest man, evidently,
the only man whose claim to fame
resides in his middle name.

I attributed it to Bob, and Alfred said "You haven't quite got it right, and that's by me, not Mezey." Sure enough I'd seen Alfred's poem in The Formalist. And read Bob's poem in his Collected. Here's Bob's version:

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
was literary, evidently,
but his chief claim to fame
is his middle name.

Now this is not a case of plagiarism, folks. Each of these very funny men wrote damn near the same poem. Inevitably!

My favorite dimeter poem, I think, must be:


The Fly
by William Blake

Little Fly
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength & breath,
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

Forgot that one, Roger--a wonderful example. I've rather
cooled on Blake over the years, but that always seems to me one of the great poems. That, and "London"

When I was first starting to read poetry, this was one of my favorites and still is. It's a little tick-tocky, but the statement is quite profound. Cunningham wrote a number of dimeter poems, but this is indubitably his best.

Meditation on Stastical Method

Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,

How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
Error slight,

But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.

Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.

A very good Cunningham, yes, but I think there's an even better one in dimeters.

FOR MY CONTEMPORARIES

How Time reverses
The proud in heart!
I now makes verses
Who aimed at art.

But I sleep well.
Ambitious boys
Whose big lines swell
With spiritual noise,

Despise me not,
And be not queasy
To praise somewhat:
Verse is not easy.

But rage who will.
Time that procured me
Good sense and skill
Of madness cured me.

Ah, professor, we could argue for some time, but I prefer the "Meditation", mainly because it shows that Cunningham had a power of phrasing that extended beyond the epigrammatical and invective poem. But "To My Contemporaries" is still excellent.

Dimeter is a blast. A differentiation between our Beowulf and the others is that rather than translate 3200 lines of tetrameter, we observed the medial caesurae and translated 6400 dimeters. As I collapsed on the message table Tuesday morning, for my Columbian medicine man to pound on my back, Fernando, a fanatical fisherman recited one of mine.

I what my hoook
beneath a pine,
than weeth a sweesh
I loff my line
offer a broook
off sparkleen wine.
Comb, leetle feesh
an we weel dine.

Outside the coils of amour, I have never been so honored in a position so prone.