The Lives of the Poets: Clerihews after Auden*

Edward Lear and his cat Foss (short for Adelphos—Greek, "Brother") sketched by Lear in an 1879 letter

… to stink of Poetry / is unbecoming, and never / to be dull shows a lack of taste. Even a limerick / ought to be something a man of / honor, awaiting death … / could read without contempt … —W. H. Auden, “The Cave of Making”

William Blake took the cake

playing at Adam and Eve in the nude.

Said Catherine Sophia:

But isn’t it rude!?

Robert Browning

wasn’t much given to clowning.

Instead of a risqué anthology,

he gave us Bishop Blougram’s Apology.

George Gordon, Lord Byron,

never slept with a Siren.

He would’ve if he could’ve.

Which is not to say he should’ve!

Arthur Hugh Clough

wasn’t terribly tough.

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

he was sometimes known to complaineth.

Grorge Herbert

denied himself that second scoop of sherbert,

fearing such indulgence

would mess up his metaphysical refulgence.

Edward Lear,

that owlish old dear,

kept a cat called Foss.

Who was definitely the boss.

John Milton

never raised a toast at the Paris Hilton

but enjoyed many a festive trinque

at the Four Seasons Hotel George V.

Alexander Pope,

being no kind of dope,

would not have wanted just any old motto

inscribed on his personal grotto!

Thomas the Rhymer,

that street-smart old timer,

was troubled by the implications

of The Gotham Review of Revelations.

Sir Thomas Wyatt

(just on the quiet)

took Noli me tangere

for a come-hither query.

Auden’s clerihews are neat—

just as witty perhaps as sweet.

He was never too grand to dream

up metaphors teetering on the brink.

*W. H. Auden, “Academic Graffiti,” in Collected Poems (Vintage International, 1991), 676–86.

Note: These clerihews were originally published in the New English Review in November 2023.

Atatürk, Smyrna, September 13, 1922

Mustafa Kemal, who remade this world,

whose portrait adorns all public places—

your mausoleum is Türkiye’s temple:

What did you dream of when Smyrna perished,

ravished, mutilated, murdered, and burned?

You, Pasha, might perhaps have stopped it.

You refused to wipe your feet on a Greek

banner laid on your doorstep to that end.

Your troops were told, tell them: “Be not afraid!”

Though fear would be the order of the night.

Was it because those killers were your kin?

Six hundred thousand fled old Ottoman

lands for Anatolia,* full of hate—

bashi-bazouks sprang up from Satan's mold.

You also lost identity and home,

stripped as an infidel of your birthplace:

Salonica was Thessalonikī now;

your mother and sister lodged in Pera,

Istanbul—you paid the rent. The rapists

were, in that respect, your tribal brothers.

Like them, you could not love the Levantine

Greeks sabered or the Armenians burned

that night. I guess you drank yourself to sleep!

Rakı drowned out the screams, the fire’s roar.

Westerners on their dreadnoughts in the Bay

looked on in horror, but at last you slept

—only to wake to unrelenting dawn

and memories that you could not forget—

such as the guilty waken, going down.

*After the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, when the Ottoman Empire was defeated by its former subject provinces Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia, almost losing even its capital, Istanbul. “L’Anatolie est pour ainsi dire saturée de émigrants,” Fabrice Monnier writes in his biography Atatürk: Naissance de la Turquie moderne (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2015), 57.

Mustafa Kemal, who abolished both the Islamic caliphate and the Ottoman sultanate, commanded that the Turks use a Latin alphabet, discard their tarbooshes, wear European hats, and adopt surnames—choosing for himself the name Atatürk, “father of the Turks”—opera lover and ballroom dancer, died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 57 at 9:05 a.m. on November 10, 1938, at which precise time, with flags at half-mast, two minutes of solemn silence have ever since been observed throughout Türkiye.

Rakı is an alcoholic beverage made of twice-distilled grape pomace and flavored with aniseed. A bashi-bazouk was an Ottoman irregular soldier.

Saturday, February 22, 2025

See if you can spot Mawmaw!

Clown: “What saith Pythagoras?

Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a fowl.

—Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

A broiler is a member of the species Gallus gallus raised for meat production.

Selective breeding causes them discomfort,

but most are slaughtered between four and six weeks of age.

Newly hatched egg layers are sorted by sex.

Males—by the hecatomb!—are eloctrocuted, decapitated, suffocated. Or simply crushed.

Billions of broilers are consumed each year in the United States alone.

See if you can spot Mawmaw! You can tell her by her white feathers her sallow, goose-bumped skin.

Friday, February 21, 2025