The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

greet me with that sun thine eyeTo change your day of youth to sullen night,Then in the number let me pass untoldSo that myself bring water for my stain,That poor retention could not so much holdKnowing thy heart torment me in disdain:O cunning love, with tears thou keep’st me blind,

Since I left you my eye is in my mind.

They are, I suppose, no more than a game, but one which can be surprisingly revealing. If nothing else, they provide a harmlessly productive way of getting to know a particular poet’s way with phrase and form. Centos that mix completely dissimilar poets’ lines are another harmless kind of comic invention.

THE CLERIHEWELIZABETH BARRETTWas kept in a garret.Her father resented it bitterlyWhen Robert Browning took her to Italy.ALFRED, LORD TENNYSONPreferred Victoria Sponge to venison.His motto was ‘Regina semper floreat’And that’s how he became Poet Laureate.OSCAR WILDEHad his reputation defiled.When he was led from the dock in tearsHe said ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking

at two years.’D. H. LAWRENCEHeld flies in abhorrence.He once wrote a verse graffitoDeploring the humble mosquito.TED HUGHESHad a very short fuse.What prompted his wrathWas being asked about Sylvia Plath.

The CLERIHEW is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, father of Nicolas, that peerless illustrator who always signed his work ‘Nicolas Bentley Drew the pictures’. The rules state that clerihews be non-metrically written in two couplets, the first of which is to be a proper name and nothing else. The best-known originals include:Christopher WrenSaid ‘I am going to dine with some men,‘If anyone callsSay I am designing St Paul’s.’Sir Humphrey DavyAbominated gravy.He lived in the odiumOf having discovered sodium.John Stuart Mill,By a mighty effort of will,Overcame his natural bonhomieAnd wrote ‘Principles of Economy’.

Metrical clumsiness is very much a desideratum; indeed, it is considered extremely bad form for a clerihew to scan. Properly done, they should tell some biographical truth, obvious or otherwise, about their subject, rather than be sheer nonsense. Sir Humphrey’s dislike of gravy, for example, may well be whimsical tosh, but he did discover sodium: I have tried to cleave to this requirement in my clerihews on the poets. Clerihews have therefore some utility as biographical mnemonics.

THE LIMERICKThere was a middle-aged writer called FryWhose book on verse was a lie.For The Ode Less TravelledSoon unravelledTo reveal some serious errors in its scansion and rhy…

Unlike clerihews, LIMERICKS, as we discovered when considering their true metrical nature (we decided they were anapaestic, if you recall), do and must scan. I am sure you need to be told little else about them. The name is said to come from a boozy tavern chorus ‘Will you come up to Limerick?’. Although they are popularly associated with Edward Lear, anonymous verses in the ‘There was an old woman of…’ formulation pre-dated him by many years:A merry old man of Oporto,Had long had the gout in his fore-toe;And oft when he spokeTo relate a good joke,A terrible twinge cut it short-O.Said a very proud Farmer at Reigate,When the Squire rode up to his high gate

‘With your horse and your hound,You had better go round,For, I say, you shan’t jump over my gate.’

That pair was accompanied by Cruikshank illustrations in a children’s ‘chap-book’ of around 1820 when Lear was just eight or nine years old. Oddly, these examples accord more closely to the modern sense of what a limerick should be than Lear’s own effusions, in which the last line often lamely repeats the first.There was an Old Man of the West,Who wore a pale plum-coloured vest;When they said, ‘Does it fit?’He replied, ‘Not a bit!’That uneasy Old Man of the West.

Rather flat to the modern ear, I find. We prefer a punchline:Girls who frequent picture palacesSet no store by psychoanalysis.And although Sigmund FreudWould be greatly annoyed,They cling to their long-standing fallacies.

Or phalluses, ho-ho-ho. It was W. S. Baring-Gould’s collection The Lure of the Limerick that really understood the base (in both senses) nature of the form. I remember owning a Panther Books edition (an imprint known for publishing risque but classy works, Genet and the like) and finding their scabrous and cloacal nature hilarious, as any unhealthy ten-year-old would. This anonymous (so far as I can tell) limerick puts it well:The limerick packs laughs anatomicalInto space that is quite economical.But the good ones I’ve seenSo seldom are cleanAnd the clean ones so seldom are comical.

When I began collecting the works of Norman Douglas I was delighted to find a copy of his 1928 anthology, Some Limericks, which remains deeply shocking to this day. Most of them are simply disgusting. Hard to believe that an antiquarian belle-lettriste like Douglas (you may remember his ‘Wagtail’ anacreontics) would dare risk attaching his name to them at a time when Ulysses was being impounded by customs officers on both sides of the Atlantic. Please do not read these four examples of Douglas’s literary excavations. Skip to the next paragraph instead.There was an old fellow of Brest,Who sucked off his wife with a zest.Despite her great yowlsHe sucked out her bowelsAnd spat them all over her chest.There was a young man of NantucketWhose prick was so long he could suck itHe said, with a grinAs he wiped off his chin:‘If my ear were a cunt, I could fuck it.’There was an old man of Corfu,Who fed upon cunt-juice and spew.When he couldn’t get this,He fed upon piss–And a bloody good substitute too.There was an old man of Brienz,The length of whose cock was immense.With one swerve he could plugA boy’s bottom in ZugAnd a kitchen-maid’s cunt in Koblenz.

Reflections on Comic and Impolite Verse

Comic forms such as the limerick and the clerihew are the pocket cartoons of poetry. Often they fail dismally to provoke the slightest smile–although those collected by Norman Douglas can certainly provoke cries of outrage and s(t)imulated disgust. It seems to me that the City of Poesy, with its associations of delicacy, refined emotion and exquisite literacy is all the richer for having these moral slums within its walls. No metropolis worth visiting is without its red-light district, its cruising areas and a bohemian village where absinthe flows, reefers glow and love is free. W. H. Auden wrote obscene comic verse which you will not find anthologised by Faber and Faber,¹⁴ and even the retiring Robert Frost had the occasional reluctant (and unconvincing) stab at being saucy. Obscenity is a fit manner for comic verse; without it the twin horrors of whimsy and cuteness threaten. There is surely no word in the language that causes the heart to sink like a stone so much as ‘humorous’. Wit is one thing, bawdy another, but humorousness…Humorousness is to wit what a suburban lawn is to either Sissinghurst or a rubbish-heap, what an executive saloon is to an Aston Martin or a cheerful old banger. Wit is either a steel rapier or a lead cosh, rarely a cutely fashioned paper dart. Wit is not nice, wit is not affirmative or consoling. Jonathan Swift describing how ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Goes to Bed’ is unafraid of being disgusting in his disgust:CORINNA, Pride of Drury-Lane,…Returning at the Midnight Hour;Four Stories climbing to her Bow’r;Then, seated on a three-legg’d Chair,Takes off her artificial Hair:Now, picking out a Crystal Eye,She wipes it clean, and lays it by.Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hide,Stuck on with Art on either Side,Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em,Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ’em.Now dexterously her Plumpers draws,That serve to fill her hollow Jaws.Untwists a Wire; and from her GumsA Set of Teeth completely comes.Pulls out the Rags contriv’d to propHer flabby Dugs and down they drop.Proceeding on, the lovely GoddessUnlaces next her Steel-Rib’d Bodice;Which by the Operator’s Skill,Press down the Lumps, the Hollows fill,Up hoes her Hand, and off she slipsThe Bolsters that supply her Hips.With gentlest Touch, she next exploresHer Shankers, Issues, running Sores,Effects of many a sad Disaster;And then to each applies a Plaster.But must, before she goes to Bed,Rub off the Daubs of White and Red;And smooth the Furrows in her Front,With greasy Paper stuck upon’t.She takes a Bolus e’er she sleeps;And then between two Blankets