In response to a column in Chemistry World in which David Jones talked about chemical verse, I pointed out an Elizabethan sonnet published by Howard Maskill, an organic chemist then of Stirling University, that has long stuck in my mind. CW published the letter, but for some reason truncated the sonnet to the first four lines. So, for the record, here is the full thing, from Nature 1981, 294, 606.
To trans, trans – tricyclo[7,3,1,O5,13]-tridecane
Shall I compare thee to a single form
of cyclohexane locked with bulky group?
Or should it be with that bicyclic norm
Whose ethane bridge 1,5 doth bridge the hoop?
Thy undistorted, perfect trans-fused rings
By force field calculation hold no strain;
No rapid rates which angle bending brings
As in bicyclo[3.2.1]octane.
To help thy ground state conformation needs
To free an equatorial tosylate,
Then ring flip from an all chair form precedes
Reaction from a boat transition state.
And then departs the leaving group when trans
Coplanar hydrogens, the rate enhance.
The actual poem was illustrated with diagrams so to do Maskill justice here is an image.
![[A scan of the letter to Nature containing Maskill's sonnet.]](http://solarsaddle.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/maskill-sonnet.jpg "maskill-sonnet")
There are several other ludicrous chemical rhymes out there, one of which is this month’s Classic Kit. I’ll post those later when I get a moment.
Don’t forget this classic JOC article on benzyne, in blank verse (and what I believe, as an ignorant organic chemist, to be iambic pentameter):
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jo00800a036
Funny you should mention that – one of my colleagues promptly sent me that reference, along with a further haiku from Maskill that, without the explanation provided in the rest of his letter (and a couple of references) is brilliantly cryptic:
“Decomposition of N-nitrosohydroxylamines”
Nitric or nitrous?
The leaving groups determine
Which oxide will form.
Nature 409, 977 (22 February 2001) | http://doi:10.1038/35059310
More to come, no doubt.