LIMERICKS: HAVING FUN WHILE MAKING SENSE OF NONSENSE

MAKING SENSE OF NONSENSE: THE LIMERICK

Nonsense is fun. Part of word magic stems from how often and how easily words give us pleasure without asking us to pay dues. Why is nonsense poetry such fun? We’re not irresponsible if we answer simply: because the words sound good together. Here is a famous example of nonsense [one verse used here] by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898).

                Jabberwocky     [speech or writing that is meaningless or intended as humorous nonsense]

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!”

The first limericks, published in London in 1821 by John Harris in The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women, were not humorous:

There was an old woman of Leeds

Who spent all her life in good deeds;

She worked for the poor

Till her fingers were sore,

This pious old woman of Leeds.

Edward Lear (1812-1888) saw the comic potential and in 1846 published his first Book of Nonsense (verses and drawings) which started the craze:

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!”

Lear kept the model’s fifth line as a recycling of the first line, though other poets didn’t, and by the end of the century an almost classical literature existed in the form—mostly by the versatile Anonymous:

There was a young fellow named Hall,

    Who fell in the spring in the fall; [who fell into a spring / who fell during the season of spring or fall]

‘Twould have been a sad thing

     If he’d died in the spring, [if he'd died from drowning in the spring / if he’d died during

the spring season]

But he didn’t—he died in the fall. [he died as a result of falling / he died during the season of fall]

The fun often comes from using a proper name, preferably polysyllabic, to end the first line and then getting the second and fifth lines to rhyme with it:

There was an old man of Nantucket

Who kept all his cash in the bucket;

But his daughter, named Nan,

Ran away with a man,

And as for the bucket, Nantucket

[As for the old man's bucket of cash... Nan—took— it; his daughter stole the money].

Limerick: Meaning & Form: A humorous poem, five lines long where the first, second and fifth lines have one rhyme and the third and fourth another.

Features of a limerick:

1. It has a rhyme scheme of [a  a  b  b  a]
2. It is humorous (creates fun)
3. It often creates ambivalence, i.e. two or more possible meanings/interpretations 
4. It often contains figurative devices, e.g. puns, hyperbole, etc. (witty play on words)
5. The last line of a good limerick often contains the PUNCHLINE (the last part of a joke or funny story that delivers the meaning and the bulk of the humour)
6. It consists of one couplet and one triplet/tercet (3^rd & 4^th lines rhyme = b b + 1^st, 2^nd and 5^th lines rhyme = a a a)

EXAMPLE:

There was a girl named Reneé

Corn pone she ate every day;

She eats it in style,

To develop her wiles,

But she’s still not my type I must say.

Rhyme scheme:

a  a  b  b  a  

Reneé [a]

day [a]

style [b]

wiles [b]

say [a]

Remember, limericks are meant to be appreciated as ‘fun poetry’. The tasks of the student, when responding to limericks, is to make sense out of nonsense, i.e. separate the sense/meaning/message of the poem from the nonsense [non—sense].

OOW

2013