Hey everybody, today i'm posting about the limerick poetic form. I became more interested in this poetry form because I am always forced to drive through a very small town called Limerick (You can't blink, or you'll miss it)... now as I drive through this "town" I always manage a fleer and eject a chortle and say to myself: "Isn't a limerick a poem?" Yes, I looked into it a few days ago, and thoroughly enjoyed what I came across.
A limerick is a humorous/vulgar metrical poem of 5 lines with a strict aabba rhyming scheme; the feet are either anapestic (uu/) or amphibrachic (u/u, one of the other 3 syllable feet we haven't learned about). Limericks utilize a lot of repetition, internal rhyme, assonance, and puns. We can somehow trace roots of this style to Ireland (where my dead maternal gram-gram is from!) and England. Some dude named Edward Lear popularized this poetic form... he was very well known for his nonsense! Heres an example:
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket
But his daughter named nan
Ran away with a man
and as for the bucket Nantucket
notice the pun???
VULGAR LANGUAGE WARNING!!! bad words are used in the next few lines. If you don't feel comfortable with them, don't read the next italicized passage.
Here is a more ribald version of the limerick (and my obvious favorite):
There once was a man from Nantucket
whose dick was so long he could suck it
and he said with a grin
as he wiped off his chin
"If my ear were a cunt i'd fuck it"
VULGAR LANGUAGE HAS ENDED!!! no more bad words are used in the following lines
Heres a little something I put together:
My friends don't believe that i'm Jewish
My bat-mitzvah shows them i'm newish
They all know i'm kosher
the pork couldn't be grosser
So good that I am oh so Jewish.
y'all should try it out it's really fun!
Your classmate ~Chance M. Carmichael~
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I find this form very uplifting disreagding the fact that it is some what crude. It's less serious, which I like, since I kind of stereotype poetry as sometime melancholy and depressing.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Gass, the great semi-experimental novelist and essayist, has a load of great dirty limericks in his long 2nd novel, The Tunnel. An example [Warning: R-rated below]:
ReplyDelete"There was a young blade named Trout,
who often got in but not out.
He stuck in the sheath
when he fucked underneath,
and the stick was as tight turned about."
There are better (and potentially more offensive) ones in the book, particularly those that begin, "I once when to bed with a nun."