Anyone can write them. All you have to do is follow the rules.
Limericks have a simple verse formula and instantly recognizable style: five lines, a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA (that cannot be tampered with), and a readily understood topic with humour an expected accompaniment. There is also an immediately recognisable metre to the scanning of a limerick, with some parody limericks making a humorous point of changing the metre of the last line or altering the rhyme scheme.
The composing of limericks has become so common, that if you get stuck with your poetic endeavours there are online limerick generators to assist, where all you have to do is feed in a few words and the computer will do the rest. But most budding versifiers prefer to write their own.
The limerick was made popular in the nineteenth century with the nonsense poems of Edward Lear, some of which he published in his A Book of Nonsense (1846). He didn’t use the term to describe them though, and took liberties with the five-line format by reducing it to four, but with his third line combining the third and fourth of a traditional limerick he retained the metre and rhyme scheme. The following famous verse is a particularly well-known Lear limerick.
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.”
The origins of the limerick go back to the eighteenth century and earlier, where they are found in a form of folklore verse, and while it is assumed that the limerick is named after the Irish city of the same name it is not clear why.
There are several topics that form distinct groups of the limerick, such as the romantic limerick, the nonsense limerick, and those written for children, which have the added bonus of forming a good introduction to poetry. One of the most popular groups is of course the rude limerick, and the famous first line, ‘There was a young man from Nantucket,’ stands at the head of a multitude of different verses written by (mostly anonymous) authors.
The following anonymous limerick puts the rude limerick into perspective.
The 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.
Why do some forms of verse remain popular? Surely humour has something to do with it.
…
Authors
Edward Lear; Anonymous
Titles
A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear
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