Alaskan Range: Limericks
Greg Hill writes about the limerick, a form which is essentially transgressive and violates the taboos of traditional poetry as a part of its function.
It seems this doctor liked to stop for a drink at the neighborhood bar after work. He only had one and always ordered the same: a daiquiri made with crushed almonds. One day as the doctor arrived, the bartender realized he was out of almonds. He did have hickory nuts, which he crushed and used as a substitute for the doctor’s daily daiquiri. The doctor took one sip, looked sternly at the bartender, and asked, “Is this an almond daiquiri?” “No,” the blushing bartender admitted, “it’s a hickory daiquiri doc.”
I inflict this on you in final honor to National Poetry Month. Let me explain.
In casting about for suitable material, I was debating writing about Walt Whitman or the more contemporary Mary Oliver, when I was distracted by limericks, which PoetryAmerica.com maintains “are held as a true folk form of poetry.” Your true modern limerick consists of a stanza of five lines, the first, second and fifth of which rhyme and contain nine syllables. The third and fourth lines have five syllables and rhyme separately. Its rhythm usually follows the three-beat amphibrachic trimeter, with the middle of the three beats being emphasized, as in “There WAS an old Man from NanTUCket.”
Just for the record, Edward Lear popularized, rather than invented, the modern limerick. The origins of limericks are rather obscure, but today they’re usually in English and bawdy. In fact, PoetryAmerica.com says the limerick “is essentially transgressive and violates the taboos of traditional poetry as a part of its function.” Thomas Aquinas, being a saint and all, eschewed naughtiness. He penned his only limerick, a tame one and the oldest on record, in Latin back in the 13th century. Its non-rhyming translation begins, “Let my viciousness be emptied,/ Desire and lust be banished,/ Charity and patience,/ Humility and obedience,/ And all the virtues increased.” Three centuries later, an imprisoned princess wrote a similarly dour side-splitter that “anticipates the limerick.” It begins “The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy,/ And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy.” She became Queen Elizabeth I.
Then in 1744 Mary Cooper published “Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book,” the earliest extant collection of children’s rhymes, which contained “Hickere, Dickere, Dock,” which some consider a proto-limerick. “The Annotated Mother Goose” suggests that “Hickory, Dickery, Dock” is intended to resemble clock sounds, “an onomatoplasm, an attempt to capture, in words, a sound.” But “The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes” insists that the famous phrase began with the counting rhymes of old-timey shepherds. The Westmorland sheep men, for example, substituted “Hevera, Devera, and Dick” for “eight, nine and ten.”
Today’s limericks are more rollicking. As an anonymous poet wrote, “The limerick packs laughs anatomical/ In space that is quite economical,/ But the good ones I’ve seen/ So seldom are clean,/ And the clean ones so seldom are comical.” Most limericks are vulgar, as proved by the leading authority on dirty jokes, folklorist Gershon Legman. A self-educated academic who described the New York Public Library as his university, the happily-named Legman became an expert on “erotic folklore and erotic verbal behavior.” Legman was also a world-renowned master at origami and worked as a bibliographer-librarian for the Kinsey Institute. Some know his 1968 book, “Rationale of the Dirty Joke,” which contains several thousand examples, along with analysis of what they mean to both those who tell them and those who laugh. Many more know Legman’s famous phrase from a 1963 University of Ohio lecture: “Make love, not war.” He wrote about limericks and considered his most important work to be his 1948 “Love and Death,” which the Dictionary of Literary Biography notes, “explored the societal trend of children allowed exposure to violence but prevented from hearing or seeing descriptions of human intercourse.”
Speaking of violent, dissipated children, and those awful Nantucket limericks: “There was an old man of Nantucket,/ Who kept all his cash in a bucket./ His daughter, called Nan,/ Ran away with a man,/ And as for the bucket Nantucket.”
Copyright © 2009
