Limerick

The influence of Edward Lear

It is usually assumed that the limerick was invented by Edward Lear (1812-88), the Victorian humorist and artist, well-known as the author of such poems as The Owl and the Pussycat and The Dong with the Luminous Nose. In fact examples of the form can be found from the early part of the nineteenth century, before Lear began writing. However, his ingenuity, wit and productivity helped to make the form popular, as in these examples:

Form

The form of the limerick is very simple: it consists of five lines, two long, two short, one long, and is rhymed a a b b a. The Lear examples quoted show one of the limitations of the form in its early stages, which is that the repetition same rhyme word twice (‘bush' and ‘Majorca') tends to soften the impact of the final line and weaken the comic effect.

Both Lear himself and the limerick writers who followed him, soon began to use a different rhyme word in the fifth line, so that it functioned more like the ‘punch line' of a joke. Here is an example by the American writer Ogden Nash (1902-71):

Intention

The limerick is invariably used for comic or satirical purposes and many of them are about pompous or hypocritical clergymen, university lecturers and politicians. They have also been used to summarise (in a humorous fashion) philosophical concepts, political ideologies and the plots of well-known novels.

Usually authors confine themselves to the standard five lines, which have the virtue of brevity and an immediate impact on the reader, but there are also longer poems in which each verse is a limerick. The relative simplicity of the form makes it accessible to a wide range of people, and many limericks are composed by people who never write any other kind of poetry. In many cases the author of a limerick is unknown and they have been passed on by word of mouth. This is especially true of obscene limericks, of which there are a large number.

Comic subversion

Authors also sometimes subvert the conventions of the genre, producing limericks that are unrhymed, ignore the rules or play games with words. The following examples give an idea of what can be done with this simple form:

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