Limerick, Poetic Form Exercise Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

A Limerick is a popular form of short, humorous verse, often nonsensical and frequently ribald. It consists of five lines, rhyming aabba, and the dominant meter is anapestic (a metrical foot composed of two short syllables followed by one long one, as in the word seventeen. 2. A line of verse using this meter; for example, “’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house”), with two feet in the third and fourth lines and three feet in the others. Examples of limerick:

"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."

"There once was a young man from Kew
who found a dead mouse in his stew.  
Said the waiter, “Don’t shout  
or wave it about,  
or the rest will be wanting one too!”

"There was an old man from Peru,
who dreamed he was eating his shoe.
He woke in a fright
in the middle of the night
and found it was perfectly true."

The origin of the term is obscure, but a group of poets in Co. Limerick, Ireland, wrote limericks in Irish in the 18th cent. The first collections in English date from c.1820. Among the most famous are those in E. Lear's Book of Nonsense (1846).