Spectator competition winners: Clerihews on well-known philosophers

In Competition No. 3314, you were invited to submit clerihews (two couplets, AABB, metrically clunky, humorous in tone) on well-known philosophers.

Eric Idle’s ‘Bruces’ Philosophers Song’ cast a long shadow over a large and jolly postbag. ‘Extraordinarily hard to avoid couplets from the Monty Python song!’ wrote A.H. Harker in a note accompanying his entry.Brian Murdoch was thinking along the same lines, as were R.M. Goddard and Nick MacKinnon: ‘We petty clerihewers can only peep about beneath the huge legs of Eric Idle…’ An honourable mention, nonetheless, to Matt Quinn, Donald Mack and Anthony Stadlen, and £8 each to the winners below.

Friedrich Nietzsche,

Emerging glumly from a monster movie double feature,

Said,

‘Godzilla is dead.’

Chris O’Carroll

Jean-Paul Sartre

Inspired Frank Sinatra.

That’s surely why La Nausée

Permeates ‘My Way’.

W.J. Webster

Proudhon

Proved a dude on

The ultra-left,

Claiming that property is theft.

Schopenhauer

Went sour

On Kant.

‘Optimism, Schmoptimism!’ he’d rant.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Bertrand Russell

fought a lifelong tussle

with the unexamined lives

of other mens’ wives.

Nick MacKinnon

Bishop George Berkeley

Saw through a glass derkeley:

‘Esse is percipi.