The limerick, bawdy and obnoxious, is not unlike a freak-show curiosity in the carnival of literary forms. It has refused--and still refuses--to die, despite its curious role as the "vehicle of cultivated, if unrepressed, sexual humor in the English language" (Legman vii).

The simplicity of the limerick quite possibly accounts for its extreme longevity. It consists of five anapestic lines with the rhyme scheme aabba. The first, second, and fifth lines are trimeter, while the third and fourth are dimeter. Often the third and fourth lines are printed as a single line with internal rhyme (Beckson 144). The following example fairly represents the genre in both style and tone:

• There once was a lady named Cager,
  Who as the result of a wager,
  Consented to fart
  The entire oboe part
  Of Mozart's quartet in F-major.

The reprinting of Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense in 1863 inadvertently created the English limerick fad. Here is an example of Lear's work:

• 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.

The English humor magazine Punch, inspired by Lear's book, began to publicize the "new" form within its pages, and thus began the limerick craze. Throughout the 1860's, Punch continued to publish clean limericks until the inevitable "bawdy and sacrilegious" (Legman x) entries were submitted by anonymous pranksters. Punch promptly shut down the contest, the fad died out, but the limerick lived on forever (Legman viii-x).

Bibliography

Beckson, Karl. Literary Terms: A Dictionary. New York: Noonday Press.

Legman, G. The Limerick. New York: Brandywine Press, 1970.

[Robert Lo]

http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/classes/Handbook/limerick.html  

Old Man with a Beard

Edward Lear

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!'