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November 7, 2010

On Poetry: Intelligence of limericks

By FLEDA BROWN Local Columnist

The world is so deadly serious right now. It's time for some limericks, don't you think?

There once was a Prof named Jerry,

Whose pate was not very hairy.

So he bought a wig like Scrooge's,

But he looked more like the Stooges:

Named Curly, and Moe, and Larry.

Well, you had to have been there ...This is only the first in a linked series of limericks (about my husband). Charlie Robinson, a former colleague of ours at the University of Delaware wrote this and many more for retirement parties, book celebrations and the like. The worse they were, the more we laughed.

But often they were really clever. Limericks depend on wordplay; they can be incredibly intelligent as well as stupid. They bash us over the head with their strong rhyme and rhythm. So of course we love them like we love rock 'n' roll and oom-pah bands in the park.

There was a young lady named Bright,

Whose speed was far faster than light;She set out one day

In a relative way,

And returned on the previous night.

-- A. H. Reginald Buller, 1923

Some people say that the limerick was invented by soldiers returning from France to the Irish town of Limerick in the 1700s, but there are many earlier examples, some of them nursery rhymes. More often than not, they're pub songs, usually pretty racy.

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.

-- Anonymous

You can make one up just by listening and following its sounds. Good practice for the ears, to get the beats in the right places. But for the record, it's a five-line poem. Three lines rhyme with each other, and two other lines rhyme, always in the same pattern. Lines 1, 2, and 5 have three beats; lines 3 and 4 have two.

A flea and a fly in a flue

Were caught, so what could they do?

Said the fly, "Let us flee."

"Let us fly," said the flea.

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

-- Ogden Nash

How can we not smile at the shift in sounds from fly to flee? And then we have a fly fleeing, and a flea flying, depending on double meanings: each word is both a noun and a verb. And flew and flue, more homonyms. Something about twisting the tongue a little, changing the sounds only a little, that amuses us. Watch the way a baby blows bubbles, then makes little smacking sounds, then goes "Maamaa, daa, daa," Before there's any association between object and thing, there's a sheer pleasure in the sounds themselves.

This is what poetry of all sorts wants to do — even when it's unrhymed and doesn't have a regular meter — charm us with sounds. The word "charm" is associated with incantation, or repeated sounds.

Okay, now I'll write you a limerick.

It has to be done on the double-quick --

with a fierce deadline --

no time to refine --

Please, someone lend me a magic-trick!

This is the best I can do, fast.

It's nice to see rhyme and meter moving back into the mainstream of poetry — not that it ever went away, but it's been eclipsed for a while. It takes sweat, intelligence and practice to make words work for us instead of letting them head wherever they want to go. It's good discipline and teaches us a lot about the subtley of language — something that seems to be forgotten in the frantic election ads and posters I've seen.

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.

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