Limerick

Let’s lighten it up a bit and go right to the limerick today. While these often humorous poems are also know to be bawdy, to say the least, how far you go with that is up to you. The basics are easy enough. A limerick has five line. Lines 1, 2, and 5 rhyme, as do lines 3 and 4. Lines 1, 2, and 5 have three beats and lines 3 and 4 have two, but we don’t have to think about that or count it out. There is an easily recognizable sing-song to the lines. You’ll know when you hit it.

There is no clear history of why it’s called a limerick, but perhaps it’s a form brought back to the Irish city of Limerick by soldiers returning from the French War around 1700. Perhaps. Whatever it’s origins, it’s a fun example of light verse.

They often start “There once was a  . . . .” but that is not a necessity for the form. They are meant to be comical and possibly off-color, if not obscene. Here is an example attributed to Anonymous:

            A limerick packs laughs anatomical

            Into space that is quite economical

                        But the good ones I’ve seen

                        So seldom are clean

            And the clean ones so seldom are comical. 

The limerick form was popularized by the English poet, Edward Lear in the mid 1800’s in his book of limericks titled Book of Nonsense. Here is some of his work: 

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!” 

            There was a Young Lady whose chin
            Resembled the point of a pin:
            So she had it made sharp,
            And purchased a harp,
            And played several tunes with her chin. 

Some others: 

My firm belief is, that Pizarro
Received education at Harrow -
This alone would suffice,
To account for his vice,
And his views superstitiously narrow.   Aldous Huxley 

Langford Reed saved the limerick verse,
From being taken away in a hearse.
He made it so clean
Now it's fit for a queen,
Re-established for better or worse.       George Bernard Shaw

 

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