Aasof’s Reflections

Very occasional I buy a copy of Private Eye, more often than not attracted by an amusing front cover, perhaps I should subscribe to it. Ahem; The Telegraph might have forced me to subscribe to it if it had made membership of its now defunct Blog Site (My Telegraph) conditional on doing so. 

To the point: I like the verse of E.J. Thribb and a recent post drew me to Thribb’s offering in the Private Eye Poetry Corner.

Lines on the retirement of Jeremy Paxman.

So. Farewell
Then Jeremy Paxman.

You were most
Famous for having
A beard, being nice
To Russell Brand
And asking the same
Question 12 times
Even if no one
Can remember
What it was.

You say you no
Longer want to
Wait up for
Newsnight and
Would prefer to go
To bed.

We know how
You feel.

E.J. Thribb (17½ times)

This is a post about amusing verse and while Thribb’s poems are free verse they amuse me. I’m not very good at blank and free verse the rhyming Clerihew — invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley — is more my style.

The Art of Biography
Is different from Geography
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about Chaps.

What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead.

 And so to a limerick.  I had reason to visit the Republic of Ireland with some European colleagues who, on a trip out, asked me what a limerick was. I said that it was difficult to explain as it was usually rude, often vulgar, invariably used colloquialisms and was a play on words. However, I gave them some examples taken from The New Oxford Book of Light Verse. Perhaps my favourites being:

While Titian was grinding rose madder
His model was posed on a ladder.
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition
So he dashed up the ladder and had her. (Anon)

A Taxi-Cab whore out at Iver
Would do the round trip for a fiver
-Quite reasonable, too,
For a sightsee, a screw,
And a ten shilling tip to the driver. (Victor Gray)

There’s a notable family named Stein
There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Ein.
Gert’s prose is all bunk,
Ep’s sculpture is junk,
And nobody understands Ein. (Anon)

As we were working collectively on a CEN European Standard, I wrote a limerick that my colleagues might understand and relate to:

Writing a standard for CEN
Requires at least twenty men
Five to oppose
What five do propose
And ten to contradict them.