Bad Limerick

As the morning preceding the Writing Group accelerated, I realised that I had very little time left to do my homework, to wit, write a limerick. Nor was I entirely sure how a limerick actually works. So of course I looked it up on Wikipedia:

"A limerick is a form of verse, usually humorous and frequently rude, in five-line, predominantly anapestic trimeter with a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA, in which the first, second and fifth line rhyme, while the third and fourth lines are shorter and share a different rhyme... The standard form of a limerick is a stanza of five lines, with the first, second and fifth rhyming with one another and having three feet of three syllables each; and the shorter third and fourth lines also rhyming with each other, but having only two feet of three syllables."

And the Poetry Foundation:

"A fixed light-verse form of five generally anapestic lines rhyming AABBA. Edward Lear, who popularized the form, fused the third and fourth lines into a single line with internal rhyme. Limericks are traditionally bawdy or just irreverent."

The Littlefield, Adams and Company Dictionary of World Literature points to 'Hickory, Dickory, Dock', where the last line repeats the first:

I think we can agree that, fortunately, a limerick is easier in practice than in theory. The practice being that there once was a man etc..

And to draw on examples:

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.

by Edward Lear

There once was an eloquent preacher

Called a hen a most elegant creature.

The hen, pleased at that,

Laid an egg in his hat,

And thus did the hen reward Beecher.

by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

There was a young man of Montrose

Who had pockets in none of his clothes.

When asked by his lass

Where he carried his brass,

He said, ‘Darling, I pay through the nose.’

by Arnold Bennett

So how did my limerick go? Not particularly well in fact. See, something about sports judging popped into my head, but only the BB made sense and none of the AA A:

The crowd may curse

But judges done worse

With this calamity to confront I popped out of my head and into the shower, where this came to me:

There once was a sound of silence

That carried on after the violence

The crowd were all shocked

The penny had dropped

And many have never been seen since

You can see why I refer to a Bad Limerick. I was thinking about the Missing Mexican Students but it appeared whole in my mind first and I had to wait a while to work out what it was about. And the title must be: 'Ya Me Cansé'

Never say, though, that the Human Translation Project is content merely to subvert and not also to take lyrical forms head on, and the tale of the tail of the limerick being told, tell also the plain paradigm:

There was a young man wrote limericks

Who found he weren’t very good at it

The more he wrote words

The more they got worse

Thank God you lot won't be seeing it

Indeed, returning to the limerick to write a page about it is a sure fire way of unleashing those As and Bs:

There B a smooth-talking criminal

Whose promos was truly subliminal

About billions the truth

Was extremely uncouth

And sadly – no longer lineal

Which just goes to show, eventually, anybody can get it.

Sources:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/limerick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerick_(poetry)

https://interestingliterature.com/2023/03/best-examples-of-limerick-poems/ I never knew Arnold Bennett wrote any limericks, but then again it appears he wrote a ton of all sorts I never knew about. Truly, you don't know what you don't know. Besides, I recall The Old Wives' Tale being very good.

Published 4 May, 2023

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