Arts: Writing verse on STEAM topics

Who says there’s no room for verse or whimsy in science? Wise people say you can’t teach poetry, but most practising writers know you can teach verse-making. As one of Australia’s better 20^th century poets taught me, if you want to rhyme platitude and attitude, always use the more common word (attitude) second. Do it the other way, and the rhyme seems forced. This chapter is all about creating rhymes that appear unforced.

One of the problems with being an adult is that you have to attend meetings. In these, you have to pretend to be interested, and that means apparently taking notes. If your hand-writing is as bad as mine, nobody can tell that you are writing, especially if you are writing verse, and don't insert line breaks.

Almost any topic will do, and they can be serious or comic. I will start with some efforts from masters. Haldane (next) is a particular favourite of mine. He let his verse out for a run quite often.

Miss Robinson and R. McCance
Have made a notable advance
On dealing with tyrosinase,
And the queer laws which it obeys.
Aided by Anderson and others
Our saccharologist Carruthers
Attacked the problem of rotation
Of glucose during activation.
—J.B.S. Haldane, Report to the Secretary of the Sir William Dunn Institute for the Year 1924-25.

Cuspidors made out of platinum
Would buckle and bend if you sat in 'em.
  You can make them of rhodium
  But never of sodium
Because then they'd explode if you spat in 'em.
— attributed to Sir John Cornforth, Australian-born chemistry Nobel laureate.

Science

There was a young lady named Bright,
Who travelled much faster than light.
  She started one day
  In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.
— Anon. and trad.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree
— Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) Trees

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While those again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
— Augustus de Morgan (1806 - 1871)

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,
but there is also a third thing, that makes it water
and nobody knows what that is.
— D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930), Pansies, 'The Third Thing'.

Twinkle, twinkle little star,
I don't wonder what you are,
For by spectroscopic ken
I know that you are hydrogen.
— Anon

“I quite realised,” said Columbus,
“That the earth was not a rhombus,
But I am a little annoyed,
To find it an oblated spheroid.”
— Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875 – 1956) (see Clerihews, below)

Technology

We tell these tales, which are strictly true,
Just by way of convincing you
How very little, since things was made,
Anything alters in anyone's trade.
— Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936), A Truthful Song.

I heard him then, for I had just
  Completed my design
To keep the Menai bridge from rust
  By boiling it in wine.
— Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1932 - 1898), Through the Looking-Glass, chapter VIII.

Gold is for the mistress — silver for the maid —
Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.
'Good!' said the Baron, sitting in his hall,
'But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of them all.'
— Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) Cold Iron.

Engineering

They shut the path through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a path through the woods.
— Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936), The Way through the Woods.

Arts

There once was a brainy baboon,
Who always breathed down a bassoon,
         For he said, 'It appears
         That in billions of years
I shall certainly hit on a tune'.
— Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 - 1944), New Pathways in Science.

Mathematics

There was a young man from Trinity
Who solved the square root of infinity.
  While counting the digits,
  He was seized by the fidgets,
Dropped science, and took up divinity.
— Anon. 

The platypus egg
Has a single leg
On which it stands
To save its hands
— Duncan Bain (1944 - ), 'The platypus egg' in Self-reverenced Sentiences (n.p.). (used by permission)

Medicine

He prayeth best who loveth best
All things great and small.
The Streptococcus is the test
I love him least of all.
—Hilaire Belloc (but was he the author? As it happens, I wrote about this in my other blog. )

Clerihews

Clerihews are a simple verse form invented by Edmund Bentley (whose middle name was Clerihew). These are amusing “potted biographies” of people. They do not need to have a rhythm (a metre, if you are pedantic), but they must have a rhyme, and they must say something about the person involved who has to be historical. Here is an example:

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

Limericks must have a perfect metre and astounding rhymes, but clerihews don’t have to scan. The aim is to be historically correct in an odd sort of way, and to get a dreadful, weird rhyme. Here are two more examples:

Sir Christopher Wren
Said: “I am going to dine with some men.
If anybody calls,
Say I’m designing St Paul’s.”

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium

Now it is time for you to try your hand. Here are some names to get started on. Most should be accessible to most people, and some are drawn from areas other than science, so feel free to pick and choose. These people will all be found, somewhere on the internet.

 

Julius Caesar	Mary Anning	Louis Pasteur	Stephen Hawking
Dame Nellie Melba	Sir Isaac Newton	Marie Curie	Enrico Fermi
Catherine the Great	Pablo Picasso	Nebuchadnezzar	Agatha Christie
Annie Jump Cannon	Burke and Wills	Kiri Te Kanawa	Jakob Bernoulli

 

Here’s just one of my attempts:

Burke and Wills
Were paying their bills,
When somebody said
Why bother? You’re dead!

Remember that you will need to investigate each of these people before you write your clerihew, and find out what they did, or do.

Just look at the examples, then do some researching before you start scribbling. Historical accuracy is never important, but historical relevance always matters. Try these starters:

Louis Pasteur                             Marie Curie
Was a him, not a her,                  Got into a fury

Jakob Bernoulli                          Pablo Picasso
Was often unruly                        Sang a rumbling basso

Florence Nightingale                   Ernest Hemingway
Always read her nightly mail        Went out the lemming way

Charles Babbage                         Alexander Graham Bell,
Hated cabbage                           Completely lost his sense of smell

Mary Anning                              Agatha Christie
Took up gold panning                 Had eyes that went misty

Samuel Morse                            Edward John Eyre
Was a vegan of course                Started losing his hair

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