'Tis the birthday of Edward Lear
Whose limericks brought us great cheer.
He had such a style
He makes us all smile
So let's honor him from far and near!
Limericks
are five-line poems with the rhyming scheme you see in my little
attempt here: Lines 1,2, and 5 rhyme, and Lines 3 and 4 rhyme. These
short poems usually have a bouncy rhythm that goes something like
this: La-LA-la-la-LA-la-la-LA, and they are often funny or at least
punny. (Bad puns abound!)
Edward
Lear, born on this date in 1812, made limericks popular with his Book
of Nonsense, which featured bunches of the short poems.
Why
are these poems called limericks? Apparently a popular limerick
mentioned the third largest city in Ireland—which is named
Limerick—and somehow the name got applied to the poems themselves.
Read
'em!
You
can read one of Lear's limericks here:
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!"
A
more modern poet who has published limericks is Ogden Nash. Here is
one of his:
A jolly young fellow from Yuma
Told an elephant joke to a puma;
Now his skeleton lies
Beneath hot western skies
--The puma had no sense of huma.
My
favorite limerick is this one by Graham Lester:
Is Algebra a fruitless endeavor?
It seems they’ve been trying forever
To find x, y, and z
And it’s quite clear to me:
If they’ve not found them yet, then they'll never!
Read
more of Lester's limericks here.
Brownielocks
has some limericks online. Here's one that's pretty cool:
A canner, exceedingly canny,
One morning remarked to his granny,
“A canner can can
Anything that he can;
But a canner can't can a can, can he?"
Write
'em!
Try
your hand at writing a limerick. Author Bruce Lansky can help.
Also
on this date:
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