The Limerick
Outside Limerick’s oldest bar, the White House in O’Connell Street, there is a plaque whose inscription reads: “The Limerick is furtive and mean;/ you must keep her in close quarantine,/ or she sneaks up to the slums/ and promptly becomes/ disorderly, drunk and obscene”. With its five line stanza and an AABBA rhyming scheme it is immediately recognizable as a form of poetry that is synonymous with the Irish city.
However, there are examples of what we now know as the limerick form well before the Irish appropriated it. One of the earliest was written by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, a Latin devotional prayer using the AABBA rhyming scheme, while Iago’s drinking song, the Canakin clink drinking song, found in Shakespeare’s Othello Act 2, Scene 3 (1603) is another. The writer whose name is indelibly associated with the genre is Edward Lear, whose The Book of Nonsense (1846) charmed its readers, young and old, with a collection of humorous five-lined poems.
Lear went a long way towards establishing the normal format of a limerick with the first, second, and fifth lines consisting of three feet of three syllables and sharing the same rhyme, while the third and fourth lines are shorter, consisting of two feet of three syllables with their own rhyme. The first American examples appeared in Charles Leland’s Ye Book of Copperheads (1863). Neither Lear nor Leland, though, called them limericks.
Limericks seem to have been sung to a popular tune, Will You come up to Limerick?, suggested by a newspaper article from St John in New Brunswick in 1880 as the perfect accompaniment to a five line poem using the AABBA rhyming scheme it had printed. However, it was not until May 1896 that anyone consciously called the poems limericks, Aubrey Beardsley writing in a letter that “I have tried to amuse myself writing limericks about my troubles”.
Beardsley’s use of the term was the culmination of the campaign waged by the Irish Literary Revival, led by W B Yeats and George Sigerson, to promote the claims of the 18th-century Maigue Poets, Seán O Tuama and Aindrias MacCraith, rather than Edward Lear as the true proponents of the poetic form. As the poets came from Croom in Co Limerick, the revivalists called their poems “limericks”, a term the British initially reserved for the more risqué versions of the poem. In turn, Fr Russell, editor of The Irish Monthly, coined the word “learic” to denote the cleaner versions.
For the British public, though, such pedantic nitpicking was too abstruse and “limerick” stuck.
