Hello and welcome to the Poets Pub's poetry style challenges. Each month we will be challenging our members to write poetry in a new style. Have you ever written a sonnet, limerick, haiku, or BLITZ poem? Well now is your chance to exercise your p...
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This month we are going to be writing Limericks!! This is a fairly simple poem to write, but before we get into the particulars of how to write them let me give you a bit of history, on this "poetry of the common folk".
No one really knows who wrote the first Limerick but variants of this form of poetry can be traced back to fourteenth century English, and before that, a similar form was found in and eleventh century French manuscript:
The lion is wondrous strong And full of the wiles of wo; And whether he pleye Or take his preye He cannot do but slo (slay)
Here you can see that this poem contains five lines and has a similar three-beat and two-beat measure, its rhyme scheme (abccb) is different from Limericks, but it is a clearly a precursor to the modern-day version of the Limerick.
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Limericks were mostly told in taverns and bars and quickly got the reputation for being bawdy and lewd. They were repeated by beggars and the working class all through the country side of England, Ireland and Scotland, during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This short rhyming poem is indeed named after the town of Limerick, Ireland.
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Even though these poems were thought of as "dirty", many were written as children's nursery rhymes and in 1845, Edward Lear published a book called 'The Book of Nonsense' in which he featured 72 limericks. Shakespeare was even known to write a Limerick every now and again.
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As stated earlier Limericks are simple to write, here are the parameters:
A Limerick is a five-line poem.
Lines 1, 2, and 5 rhyme and usually have 5 to 10 syllables.
Lines 3 and 4 rhyme and usually have 5 to 7 syllables.
So, the rhyme scheme would be aabba.
They are also written with a particular rhythm that looks something like this:
Please do not get bogged down in trying to get the rhythm perfect. This is a fun poetry style to write, so please give it a try!!
Here are some more examples of Limericks by Edward Lear:
There was an Old Man of Kilkenny, Who never had more than a penny; He spent all that money, In onions and honey, That wayward Old Man of Kilkenny.
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There was on Old Man of the Isles, Whose face was pervaded with smiles; He sung high dum diddle, And played on the fiddle, That amiable Man of the Isles.
This one is several Limericks put together in a longer poem:
