limericks

The limerick is a five-line poem in AABBA rhyme with a distinctive anapestic rhythm: da-da-DUM, da-da-DUM. Versions of the form appeared in English poetry well before the word existed: Isaac Watts used similar meters in his 1715 'Divine Songs for Children,' and several songs in Shakespeare's plays share the pattern. What the form lacked was a name that would make it recognizable to anyone who heard it. That name came from Ireland.

Edward Lear's 'A Book of Nonsense' (1846) fixed the limerick's structure in the public mind, though Lear himself never used the word. His 212 verses all followed the same pattern: the first, second, and fifth lines rhyme; the third and fourth are shorter and rhyme with each other; and the last line usually restates the first with slight variation. Lear created them for the children at Knowsley Hall, the Earl of Derby's estate in Lancashire, and published them without expecting much. They changed English comic verse permanently.

The name 'limerick' appears in print around 1898, drawn from a parlor game popular in the 1880s and 1890s. Each guest at the table composed a five-line verse and the company responded by singing the chorus: 'Will you come up to Limerick?' The city of Limerick on the River Shannon in County Clare, Ireland, gave the verse its permanent name, though the city's own Irish name, 'Luimneach,' means a barren strip of land beside water. It is a thoroughly unlikely muse for the most cheerful of verse forms.

By the early 20th century, limericks had acquired a reputation for bawdiness that obscures their range. W.H. Auden wrote them; so did Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley. The form's compression forces precision: fewer than forty syllables to establish a character, a situation, and a punchline. Ogden Nash called it the most democratic of poetic forms because it rewards wit more reliably than craft.