A limerick is a humorous five-line poem with an AABBA rhyme scheme. It is an accented verse, with flexibility in syllables. Edward Lear popularized it in A Book of Nonsense. Modern limericks end with a punchline and cover various subjects, including obscene ones. Some play with shape and combine with other forms.
A limerick is a five-line humorous poem with an AABBA rhyme scheme. It is around 500 years old and is believed to have first been used as a distinct form in the late 16th century. The limerick was popularized by Edward Lear in A Book of Nonsense, which includes many limericks and other poems, for example “The Owl and the Pussy Cat”.
Limericks are accented verse, meaning that satisfactory construction of a line is determined by the number of accents with little or no consideration of the number of syllables. In this it differs from measured verse, which is stressed-syllabic, taking into account both the pattern of accents and the number of syllables. Since syllables are not counted, the stressed verse has some flexibility. Ballads and nursery rhymes are other types of accented verse. In limericks, accents work like this:
Row 1: 3 accents
Row 2: 3 accents
Row 3: 2 accents
Row 4: 2 accents
Row 5: 3 accents
Because of the freedom afforded by the accented verse, the first verse might go like this: Once upon a time there was a young man from Berlin. or it could work like this: there was a young man from Berlin. Similarly the third line could go like this: He rode a whale or it could go like this: And he rode a whale. No matter what variations are used, the result is a verse that basically has an anapestic feel – a pattern of strong, weak, weak.
The limerick form practiced by Lear was often different in two respects from what we expect from limericks today. Lear often uses the limerick’s fifth line as little more than a paraphrase of line 1 or 2, or some combination thereof. Also, he generally uses the same word at the end of line 5 as at the end of line 1. For example,
There was a young woman from Chiara,
Which was sadly chased by a bear;
When she found out she was tired,
It suddenly expired,
That unfortunate Lady of Chiara.
However, neither generalization is always the case. Sometimes the final line serves more as a punchline, as in most modern limericks, and ends with a different word.
There was an Old Man from Berlin,
Whose shape was unusually thin;
Until once, by mistake,
It was mixed in a cake,
So they baked that Old Man from Berlin.
There was an Old Lady whose folly
He tricked her into sitting in a holly;
To that, for a plug
Her dress is ripped
She quickly became melancholy.
Most modern limericks generally end with a punchline, in the same way as many jokes. There has also been an expansion of the subject matter covered in limericks since the time of Lear, and there are many obscene limericks nowadays. Here’s a limerick with a punchline:
There was a young man from Darjeeling,
Who got on a bus to Ealing.
He said at the door:
“Don’t spit on the floor.”
Then he spat carefully on the ceiling.
Another development is that some people are interested in playing with shape, as in this anonymous limerick:
A decrepit old gas station man named Peter,
While I’m looking for the meter,
He touched a leak with his flashlight.
He rose out of sight,
And, as anyone reading this can see, it also destroyed the meter.
WS Gilbert played with the shape differently:
There was an old man from St Bees
Which was horribly stung by a wasp.
When they said, “Does it hurt?”
He replied, “No, he doesn’t-
It’s a good job, it wasn’t a bumblebee!”
People have also combined limericks with other forms, in this case, a tongue twister, ignoring the BB rhyme:
A flea and a fly in a flue
They were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly: “Let’s flee!”
Said the flea: “Let’s fly!”
Then they flew through a flaw in the flue.
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