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THE LIMERICK
A FACET OF OUR CULTURE
For private distribution
Not to be mailed, handled, shipped, sold
or distributed in violation of any
pertaining federal, state, local or other regulations
THE LIMERICK
A FACET OF OUR CULTURE
A study of the history and development of the limerick,
ensplendor'd with over two hundred examples of the im-
mortal verse form, commentaries, and index.
ANNOTATED AND UNEXPURGATED
Privately Printed
For private circulation to subscribers only
No copies for general sale
Mexico City
1944
THE LIMERICK
A FACET OF OUR CULTURE
has been printed for a small number of Experts and
Specialists, Scho!ars, Psychiatrists, Sociologists, and
Anthropologists,
The project has been conceived, executed, and concluded
as a tribute to our lost freedom---------the freedom of the
individual.--------It is dedicated to — Man's renaissance
from the blind tyranny of Law.
Two Hundred and Fifty Copies have been manufactured
at The Cruciform Press, Mexico City. Each is numbered.
This is Number
THE LIMERICK
FOREWORD
The Limerick, that concise poetry which is now so
firm a cornerstone of our rudimentary culture deserves a
more comprehensive treatment than that given it by Nor -
man Douglas in his priceless volume -Some Limericks -(1)
and by Langford Reed in - The Complete Limerick Book -
a wholly emasculated work which is a witless travesty of
this virile form of verse. (2) Knowing Mr. Douglas' great
feeling for this topic, and fully aware of the immortality
of his early contribution, I have built this work around his,
not only to preserve the remarkable essence of the earlier
book, but to add a definitive touch to this one. Unsparing
use has also been made of the limericks recorded in the
back of Immortalia. (3) Most of these verses, however, stem
directly from the people. Some crude, unfinished rimes
which are so obviously the fruit of mere smutty minds have
been excluded on the grounds that they seem to have no
real foundation in the volcanic springs of our society and
culture whence the real limerick comes.
The limerick is now an abiding part of our literature
and our folk-lore. It is a highly spontaneous expression of
the common man's ability to abstract the essence of a hu-
man situation, and to render it in a highly disciplined and
climactic verse form. But its history remains mysterious
and legendary.
(1) Some Limericks—by Norman Douglas, Privately Printed, 1929 (97 pages).
Has appeared in pirated reprints in this country.
(2) The Complete Limerick Book by Langford Reed, New York and London:
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1925 (154 pages). Other recent emasculated limerick books:
Mr. Punch's Limerick Book—(140 pages); Book of American Limericks—compiled by
Carolyn Wells, G. P. Putnam's Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1925 (91 pages).
(3) Immortalia—An Anthology of American Ballads . . . etc. by a Gentleman
About Town. Privately printed, 1000 copies for subscribers. None for general
sale (184 pages).
i
There have been very few poets who did not write
"dirty" poems at some time or other in their careers. Of
recent years limericks have tended to take the place of long-
er poems like Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," "Jonathan
Swift's "StrephonandChloe," and Lord Byron's "Enchant-
ment," "To Rosalie" and "Don Leon." Even during The
Golden Age of the limerick longer poems were still in fash-
ion, poems like Eugene Field's "The Fair Limousin," "So-
cratic Love," or his "Parody on The Old Oaken Bucket."
But unfortunately in these days of canned music, people
have a short memory and cannot remember, nor do they
seem to require, such long and detailed ballads. Only traces
of these longer immortal verses are ndwf ound, many of them
reduced in spirit to compact limericks whose very vitaHty
and motion seem to inspire mnemonics. It is actually the
people, therefore, who originated and perpetuated these
verses to take the place of a poetry now denied them by
speedier and more highly socialized times. Limericks in one
sense are the swansong of the popular, robust life and con-
vivial poetry of earlier ages, one clear, lonely, streamlined
note still lingering over a wasteland of neurotic prudery.
It may be difficult for everyone to comprehend the
vast social implications of this book, for not everyone is a
seeker after the moral strength which lies in unprejudiced
knowledge, in tolerance, and in human understanding.
There seems to be little hope that Webster, Shakespeare,
Swift, Burns, Walt Whitman and countless other now
emasculated and bowdlerized poets will ever be allowed to
arise again with all their original well-rounded vigour re-
stored, and to revitalize our literature and our culture. (1)
(I) Sec for example: The Merry Muses—by Robert Burns. Made in fac-
simile of original edition. Privately Printed. Not for sale. 500 copies. Not
dated (119 pages).
"Say, Puritan, can it be wrong
To dress plain truths in witty song?"
Many pirated variants of this work are extant.
ii
It is the cancer of suppressed human motivations festering!
under the unclean bandages of censorship which is grad-|
uaily sterilizing our poetry and perverting our lives. Bull
the most stringent paper morality has not prevented these!
verses from traveling jocularly back and forth across ouii
country with all the original freedom of 1776. The shame!
of it is that their haunting humor, their native music and
rhythmical magic have not been permitted to become a
part of the written record of our life. True unabashed folk
poetry is gradually fading out, for vocal moralists and others'
who feel called to shape our preconceptions have complete-
ly confused -their- conception of life, with life as it act-
ually -is, - in the naive adolescent minds of the public.
A comprehensive treatment of the limerick must touch
on the growing contradiction between our spoken and our
written culture, between the nimby-pamby historical re-
cord of our good intentions and the fundamental crudity
of our actual behavior. There is a vast difference between
life as it actually is and life as some people suppose it to be.
Life is always being misdefined by effete, sterile, thwarted,
self-appointed and often wholly misguided guardians of
"public" morality. But the public has compensated for
these false definitions by preserving the essence of human
situations in the limerick. I only wish therefore to set down
this one neglected facet of our folk literature as it has come
to me through innumerable pleasant contacts with men
in almost all walks of life, at many times, and in many
places. This is a record at once serious and humorous. It
must be serious because it might otherwise be grossly mis-
judged. It is inescapably humorous because it is as episod-
ic and as human as life itself. As long as the limerick lives,
the moralists cannot make of the world a glum and un-
happy place.
Ill
There have been several technical and selective problems
involved in this book over the solution of which scholars
may disagree. If this disagreement will only spur them on
to improve my work, I will not feel my research has been
in vain.
One of the main problems has been that of indexing or
identifying the limericks. It was not possible to continue
to use mere place names after the pattern of Norman
Douglas for many fine examples do not have a first line
ending in a geographical or proper name. Nor can one ar-
range them purely on a topical or riming basis without get-
ting into undue complexities. Somewhat reluctantly, be-
cause it gives a rather mechanical approach, I have arranged
this treatment in alphabetical order. Here and there, how-
ever, similar verses are brought together for generic or com-
parative purposes so as to broaden the handling.
The last word of the first line usually gives the clue to
the indexed word. Sometimes the last important word, or
the word bearing the accent of the final anapest in the first
line is the indexed word, to wit:
There was a young girl from - Tunbridge Creek.
There was a young fellow a - banker.
Love letters no longer they write us.
While Titian was mixing - rose madder.
There is some cross indexing. But to locate a limerick
under any system of alphabetical arrangement it is almost
always necessary to recite the first line to catch the indica-
tive word.
My treatment of each limerick is broadly after the orig-
inal manner of Norman Douglas. Indeed I have boldly and
unashamedly borrowed much of his commentary, amend-
ing and editing for scholarly long range purposes. The
majority of my original comments of a philosophical and
sociological nature, however, have been severely edited, for
the book as originally written grew unconscionably long.
IV
Alternative lines have been indicated when conflicting!
versions are known. Limericks of unpolished, amateurish,!
or other dubious origin not consistent with the finish the
immortal verse acquires from public use and transmission
have been largely excluded. Only here and there have I suc-
cumbed to a sense of completeness and put in a rime which
is forced, and when I did it was because I felt the verse had
been corrupted from a finer one, or might contain noble
elements capable of ultimate refinement.
Any folk poetry which is conceived in back of the barn,
and which grows behind garage doors until it is at last spo-
ken from man to man across the whole country must suf-
fer many stages in its transition from a mere often smutty
cleverness to a piece of polished folk verse. At last, however,
each word is so perfect, so worn, so tried, so natural it
will admit no other in its place. Thus there is little dang-
er of recording a garbled version of really finished limericks.
However, like pebbles in a stream bed, there are always
limericks in every state of polish. Where the verse seems
to show no hint of a cultural past, no promise of a refined,
enduring or popular future, it has been omitted. Usually
such rimes are merely pornographic or foul, and they will
require a great deal more tumbling in the rocky stream
bed of life before they become well-rounded, and th£ eter-
nal property of all the countless people who helped im-
mortalize them.
We shall occasionally be concerned with the problem of
the emasculation which some limericks have undergone.
The preponderance of evidence indicates most limericks
saw the light of day in risque or so called "dirty" versions.
Only latterly were they translated into vapid drawing-room
literature from the colloquial. Some no doubt began as effete
creations of the dilettante - pure ingenious things which
sound like the ineffectual beating of unfeathered wings
in an inane void. The immortal limerick however requires
the living substances the people impart in perpetuating it.
V
What pure pieces survive are usually those with companion
versions of a pungent and earthy nature. To determine
whether the *'clean" or the "dirty V version of a limerick
was the original is like trying to decide which came first
the chicken or the egg. Whichever it was, there is no doubt
that the coarse, risque limerick has a longer and wider ten-
ure than the empty one, no matter how witty or deft the
emptiness may be, and that fact must be frankly faced in
any definitive record of the verse form. The problem of
selectivity is large.(l) I have included a few pure or book
limericks, but I must observe that few pure rimes are
found preserved at my source, that is on the tongues of
people. The public draws the line at the inanity of the lim-
erick, and so do I.
The times are changing. Victorianism whose quaint
morality manured the field of limerology is passing. The
best limericks should be printed now lest further social
regimentation forever deprive the written record of this
fertile means of comment on our frailties.
Sir Richard Burton in his "Note on Pornography" con-
cludes for me:
Readers will probably agree with me that the naive
indecencies of the text are rather gaudiserie than pru-
rience; and when delivered with mirth and humor they
are rather the "excrements of wit" than designed for
debauching the mind. Crude and indelicate with infan-
tile plainenss; even gross and at times "nasty" in their
terrible frankness, they cannot be accused of corrupt-
ing suggestiveness or subtle insinuation of vicious sen-
timent. Theirs is a coarseness of language not of idea;
they are indecent, not depraved; and the pure and per-
fect naturalness of their nudity seems almost to purify
it, showing that the matter is rather of manners than
of morals................;
(I) In his confident manner Louis Untermeycr estimates more than a mil-
lion limericks have come into existence. "Good Old Limericks" by Louis Unter-
meyer—Good Housekeeping—(December, 1945), p. 26. *
VI
And now I proceed to discuss the matter serieuse-
ment, honnetement, historiquement; to show it in
decent nudity not in suggestive fig leaf or feuille de
vigne. (1)
(I) See—The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night—Privately printed
by The Burton Club, not dated. Volume 10. Terminal £ssay by Sir Richard Bur-
.ton, pages 176 and 178. Of course Burton was talking oMthe Arabian Nights, but
how well his words fit The Limerick.
VII
INTRODUCTION
I
The limerick has long been a vital spark in American
life, but because of its inherent salaciousness it has
never received the poetic nor the scholarly recognition due
it. Sometimes it is erroneously regarded merely as a survi-
val of long slow journeys in smoking-cars from the that-re-
minds-me era. However its antiquity and its ubiquity are
proven facts. Men from all walks of life and many states of
the union, for example, when assigned to dreary Alaskan
outpost duty found a common bond of spirit in the limer-
ick and whiled away the winters by compiling a collection
of them.(l) However any real education in the limerick
can only be gained piecemeal because no really thorough
study has ever been made of it; and while many writers
from scribbling schoolboys to erudite authors are constant-
ly busy with limericks, it is frowned upon by academic
purists and hyper literary poets.
Only a hidebound individual who says that the facts of
life as caught by the limerick are unendurable, only a quin-
tessential fool would not realize that these verses are of
definite value to the record of our living culture. This stu-
dy is made primarily for people who appeciate that any
true sociological record must be one of facts not of pure,
dry, and largely mythological generalizations. The art and
literature of the ancients was far healthier than our own
because the facts of life were taken as a matter of course.
Today the facts of life as people live and speak it have
been cruelly distorted because they are suppressed and de-
leted from the record of our own and all prseeding cultures.
This emasculation, this suppression particularly of all
matters pertaining to sex and excretions, has resulted in a
wholly false and exaggerated emphasis being placed upon
them. A concurrent false delicacy has also resulted in some
(I) This collection I understand reached the States only in mimeographed
form and was lost before it came into scholarly hands.
\
cases in concentrating these ever present human matters
in the brief limerick form, since society now allows so few
other means of expression. However, the inspiration for
the limerick has proved harder to suppress than a fire in
the hold of a cotton ship.
I am always appalled by some people's extravagant
sense of Tightness, and by their conjoint intolerance of any-
thing as natural and expressive as the limerick. We feel free
to send missionaries abroad, but when the Buddhists came
to New York and distributed tracts in front of one of - our-
churches they were put in jail. - The Kama Sutra, - (1) the
sacred writings of the socio-sexual life of a people far more
numerous and cultured than our own and who have never
used the atom bomb, is suppressed in this country as por-
nography; yet our busy divorce courts and tragic neurotics
testify eloquently to our need of such a sensible book
(couched of course in terms of our own civilization). Special
interests working through the infallible disguise of govern-
ment sued the magazine "Esquire" for indecency; yet in
the trial "experts" on "indecency" were ludicrously unable
to identify as "indecent" masked selections from- many -
leading periodicals without making themselves out to be
simply jack-asses. To »um up, probably seven out of every
ten persons in this country are actually if unknowingly en-
gaged in a subtle underground war on "decency," on "mor-
ality," and on religous bigotry because they listen to or tell
"dirty" stories, or more pointedly because they relish or
repeat mean gossip of other people's failings. However there
is nothing personal, nothing bitter, nothing squalid about
the limerick. It is a social phenomenon devoid of the barb
of gossip, the sting of the quip, and of the insidious immor-
ality which hovers in various disguises all around us.
It is a minority then (but this truth will never be ad-
mitted) who would class the limerick as ^ degenerate or
crude ethnological expression. Actually the numerous verses
(I) The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana—Translated from the Sanscrit, Benares,
New York. Printed for the Society of the Friends of India, 1883-1925. For
private circulation only (175 pages).
2
in Lear's - Nonsense Rymes - and in - The Complete Lim-
erick Book - and other such witless volumes are dangerously
effeminate, and more subtly corrupting than any of the
forthright verses given here because of their implicit chal-
lenge to the reader to trace their patently robust ancestry.
Euphemism is a semantic curse wished upon weaker
minds by miserable prudes. It fills our wards with psychotics
and others mysteriously maladjusted. It takes hundreds
of hours of interviewing to get to the root of most psycho-
logical trouble, and in most cases the difficulty is one of re-
pression and suppression which began with a sense of false
delicacy. The shock of realizing the world is really a lot
rawer place than some people have been mislead to believe
plunges many a soul into acute misery and discomfort. It
is impossible therefore for some bible-fed intolerants to
realize that these limericks are actually a - living - part of
our contemporary culture. Indeed they are much more
part of our poetic literature than many hollow poems penned
by white-souled poets. Only limericks are a lot happier and
more jovial than most poetry.
While it is true that many limericks are coarse or ob-
scene,(l) dealing with intercourse, excrement, abnormali-
ties, perversions, filth and dirt, yet all these things psycho-
logically interpenetrate our living culture to a vast extent.
These folk-verses by unknown poets cannat help then but
reflect the true surface of human life as any such funda-
mental and spontaneous expressions inevitably mirror it.
Birth is a bloody business at best; and death is beset by a
foul decay. Betweenthese unconcious inescapable acts, we do
many conscious ones thatare just as bloody and foul wheth-
er it be waging atomic war, going to the toilet, or merely
being intolerant or unkind. The limerick presents a mer-
ciless and totally uneuphemistic cross section of all our of
(I) Louis Untermeyer in "Good Old Limericks,"—Good Housekeeping—(De-
cember, 1945), p. 26 divides all limericfes glibly as follows: the simple, the
in-
tricate, and the unprintable—the latter, "tho transmitted verbally are by no
means the least popular." He says the same thing in—Forms of Poetry—New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1926, p. 58.
3
ten ridiculous actions and beliefs. Many people cannot stand
any record of life as it is, but only as they like to imagine
it to be. Such fictionally minded persons will find this re-
cord of folk-lore incredible or distasteful, depending on the
extent of their realization of what humor actually is as a
great free people express and enjoy it.
The limerick involves a real poetry, real because it is
spontaneous, and because it springs from the innate sense
of rhythm and rime latent in the public consciousness. It
is a native poetry from under the skin of the people. An in-
creasing portion of our society is prone to forget sometimes
- what - does lie under the skin of the people - not only
blood and guts and sweat and tears, but feelings, perver-
sions, humor, cruelty, wisdom, sexual urges, kindness, sa-
distic tendencies, pride and many other mixed human
strengths and frailties. The limerick is as vigorous as life
itself and probes these several deep things as skillfully as
any religion. It is also as various as any average section of
our melting pot culture.
A mere dirty limerick is often a forced or raw one. Such
verses are usually inane attempts of immature minds to
produce or imitate a verse form which must be. character-
ized by an actual or latent greatness inconceiveable to such
a mind. But sometimes a very good limerick is also a very
raw one, as:
There was an old man of Corfu
Who fed upon cunt-juice and spew.
When he couldn't get that
He ate what he shat —
And mighty good shit he shat, too.
Sometimes the ribald limerick by its very shock value is a
key to unlock the door of camaraderie between strangers.
It is the warp of our poetic culture in a sense, but since it
has only been spoken it seems to have no definite pattern
or fabric as yet. It pops up all over the country at once, and
like a password admits the traveler wherever he goes. It
knits our varied experience into a unified and solid expres-
sion of our national life. Recall:
4
There was a young lady of fashion
Who had oodles and oodles of passion.
She laughed as she said,
"Come jump into bed,
Here's one thing that Nelson can't ration!"
It will not be long before such a verse tends to be de-
leted by use and changing conditions of its contemporary
reference, and becomes a part of our culture, handed on
from man to boy - a novelty to each generation, aid so
perpetually reborn. Good limericks continue to rise like
the Phoenix from the ashes of old age and intolerance.
There has undoubtedly been a comparatively rapid de-
velopment of the limerick in relation to other verse forms.
Norman Douglas recognizes "The Golden Period" (of Vic -
torianism) as being the first and greatest in its history. He
says we are now in "The Silver Age" the sophisticated aje,
the age of laborious ornamentation, as for example:
There was a young girl of Aberystwith
Who went to the mill they grind grist with.
There the miller's son Jack
Laid her down on her back
And united the things that they pissed with.
Or the less familiar:
There was an old man at the Terminus
Whose bush and whose bum were all verminous.
They said, "you — sale Boche —
You really must wash
Before you start planting your sperm in us!"
Some of the baroque verses of the exotic school are not with-
out charm, but the earlier, simpler verses perhaps have a
more fundamental appeal.
The - Terminus - rime, however, does point up one thing,
that many limericks are definitely English in their origin.
Even as we get them in this country they tend to retain the
peculiar ear marks of their British inception, either in quaint
place names, or in unfamiliar slang expressions in good use
elsewhere. For'example, the words- bum-, -quim~, -arse,
5
- blocked - ( for - fucked - from the Cornish expression
,'to put the blocks (ballocks?) to her") and such like, spot,
a verse's English origin just as clearly as the tone of this
one does:
The Dean undressed with pious zest
The Vicar's wife to lie on.
She thought it rude
To do it nude
So he kept his old school tie on!
6
II
The origin of the limerick is definitely obscure. Brander
Matthews says it is the only fixed verse form indigenous to
the English language. One authority however does state that
examples of Latin and Greek limericks are extant,(1) but I
have never come across any, except obvious translations like:
Puella Rigensis ridebat
Quam tigris in tergo vehebat.
Externa profecta,
Interna revecta
Risusque cum tigre manebat.
A fifteenth century manuscript in Old English (the Harl Ms
No. 7312) gives averse form indicative in embryonic fashion
of today's familiar verse, to wit:
The Lion is wonderly strong
And ful of wiles of wo.
And whether he playe
Or take his preye
He can not do but slo (slay). (2)
Another scholar says that the limerick is one of the few
verse forms to have originated in America.(3) This is un-
doubtedly because of the fact that many of Mother Goose's
Melodies were in limerick form, and were reprinted in var-
ious guises in old chap books over the years between 1719
and 1846.
Indeed limericks may well be said to be the nursery
rimes of adults. Most people never grow up in some ways.
In the limerick they can guiltlessly parody their latent sense
of immaturity. Since the limerick is funny, it is by the
(1) L A. S, Strong, Common Sense About Poetry, London: Victor Gollancz
Ltd. 1932 (167 pages). Pages 36-44 treat the limerick. Does the author refer to
epigrams?
(2) Robert Swann—The Making of Verse—London: Sidgewick and Jackson,
1934 (160 pages).
(3) Mason Long—Poetry and Its Forms, New York; G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1938 (487 pages).
7
same admission, innocent, for laughter deflates the erotic
impulse, and allows one to recapture the pristine state of
one's immaturity. An ingenious scholar has even managed
to find a verse in limerick form in Shakespeare's Othello
written in 1604. In act II, Scene III, lago calls for some wine
and sings:
And let me the canakin clink, clink;
And let me the canakin clink;
A soldier's a man
A life's but a span;
Why, then, let a soldier drink.
One outstanding attempt to pierce the deep gloom sur-
rounding the history of the limerick is in tracing its origin
to the Vertigoose family who reached New England in 1650.
Over the ensuing 75 years, the first two syllables of the
name were dropped. On June 8, 1715, Thomas Fleet, print-
er, of Boston was married to one Elizabeth Goose by the Rev-
erend Cotton Mather. Nature took her course, and in 1719
a small volume appeared called - Songs for the Nursery -,
- or — Mother Goose's Melodies for Children - (printed by
Thos. Fleet at his Printing House, Pudding Lane, Boston,
Price: 2 Coppers).(l)
From this volume comes of course:
Dickory, Dickory Dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one
The mouse ran down
Dickory, Dickory Dock.
And also a more indicative verse, soon deleted, which goes:
Danty, baby, diddy
What can mammy do wid' ee,
But sit in a lap
And give *un a pap ?
Sing: Danty, baby, diddy.
The corruption of the nursery rime has been a pastime
dear to the heart of the ageless insuppressible poet Anon;
(I) Clement Wood-—The Craft of Poetry—New York: E. P. Dutton and
Company, 1929 (389 pages). The limerick is treated on pages 277-282.
8
Nearly every one has been usefully parodied, from the quat-
rain about "four and twenty black turds stinking in a pie"
to the purer limerick form of:
Tom Tom the piper's son
Let loose a fart and away he run.
But Tom fell in
An old shit bin
And ever since then Tom stinks like sin!(l)
Some effort has been made by Langford Reed to show
a French origin for the verse form. He quotes a French ep'-
gram which appeared in - The Menagerie - in 1716, and
dealt with a young lady who appeared at a masquerade
dressed as a Jesuit during the now obscure struggle between
the followers of Molinos arid Jansensus. This verse was po-
litical in nature, as many nursery rimes are said to have
been at the outset, and is found in'Boswell's - Life of John-
son, to wit:
On s'etonne ici que Caliste
Ait pris Thabit de Moliniste
Puisque cette jeune beaute
Ote a chacun sa liberte
N'est-ce pas une Janseniste.
He further states that the limerick was first brought to the
attention of English speaking people about 1700 when the
soldiers of the Irish Brigade who were attached to the
French Army from 1691 on for nearly a hundred years began
to return to Ireland's County Limerick from France with a
choice assortment of them adapted from French Nonsense
Verse. (2) He also adduces what I am sure is a translation:
Digerie, digerie doge
La souris ascend V horloge
L'horloge frappe
(1) The Eternal Eve—From a Mid-Victorian Manuscript "The Duchess." Un-
expurgated edition. Modernized and revised. Printed for Private Distribution,
1941 (258 pages). No author. No publisher. Quotation from p. 166.
(2) See Encyclopedia Brittannica and Life Magazine for January 28, 1946,
p. 19.
<>
La souris s'echappe
Digerie, digerie doge.
Undoubtedly Dickory Dickory Dock is a pure form of this
verse. But Higgory and Diggory were fairly common Christ-
ian names a hundred or so years ago, and undoubtedly were
used in the original Mother Goose poem as it wasspoken.(l)
However other authorities, among them The Encyclo-
pedia Brittanica, do not feel that the point of a French or-
igin for the limerick has been established. Indeed Reed him-
self did not mention it in his original essay in the 1925 edi-
tion of - The Complete Limerick Book -. If the theory is
correct, then nothing is adduced to show how the verse form
travelled from Ireland to England and America. Besides,
there has been no evidence presented to show that if the
outline of the limerick did come from French nonsense
jingles where the pattern of the French nonsense verse it-
self came from.
There seems to be little doubt but that it was the art-
ist and queer epileptic ornithologist Edward Lear (2) who
finally crystallized the epigrammatic form of the limerick
from the often mere doggerel verse of earlier times, even
though he obviously did not invent it. Actually Lear's
Rimes are rougher and his meter more forced than most
subsequent efforts. There is a verse that was current a-
round 1834 which goes:
There was a young man of St. Kitts
Who was very much troubled with fits.
The eclipse of the moon
Threw him into a swoon
(1) The Little Book of Limericks—Reilly and Britton Company, 1910. This
volume is interesting because of its attempts to give sources of the pure poems
found in it.
(2) Lear was born at Holloway, London May 12, 1812 and died at San
Remo, Italy, January 29, 1888.
10
When he tumbled and broke into bits. (1)
So Lear was not the only person concerned with the gener-
al rhythm during the years 1832-36 when he wrote his hu-
morous verses to amuse the Earl of Derby's (his friend and
patron) grandchildren. What a pattern of potential cor-
ruption he must have laid in their young Victorian minds!
Lear was a studied if not a well-known landscape painter
and had illustrated -The Knowsley Menagerie - for the Earl
of Derby. His artistic bent naturally led to his making the
ridiculous sketches which now distinguish his Nonsense
Book.(2) Lear's Rhymes were first published in 1846 and
have gone through many editions over the year,s
His was by no means the first collection of nonsense
rimes on the limerick pattern, as we have seen. The Mother
Goose Melodies were often in limerick form, and it is im-
portant to remember that "Mrs." Goose" did not write her
verses, but culled them from old folk rimes. There were
also anonymous collections of nonsense verse for children
which appeared in 1814, 1820, etc., many of which were in
limerick form,(3) albeit they would now be considered but
poor examples of limerology. The stanzas of some old bal-
lads also approached the general pattern of the limerick in
several instances.
The original rime which is said to have inspired Lear
was mentioned by Dickens in Chapter 2 of - Our Mutual
Friend. - It is said to be from - Mother Goose's Nursery
Rhymes, - and goes:
There was an old man of Tobago
Who long lived on rice, gruel and sago
Till one day to his bliss,
His physician said this,
(1) The Little Book of Limericks—Reilly and Britton Company, 1910.
(2) Edward Lear—The Book of Nonsense and More Nonsense—London and
New York: Frederick Warne and Company, Ltd., 1894, etc., etc., etc. See also—
the two-sided Mr. Lear—by William Gaunt—Art News Annual, 1948, pp. 99-106.
(3) Swann—The Making of Verse.
li
"To a leg of roast mutton, Sir, you may go/'(l)
According to - What's Funny and Why, - this was the first
limerick printed in Punch. According to the less glib schol-
arship of - Mr. Punch's Limerick Book, - the first limerick
to appear in Punch was found in the December, 1845 is-
sue as follows:
AH old broom of St. Stephens
That set all at sixes and sevens,
And to sweep from the room
The Connections of Brougham
Was the work of this Broom of St. Stephens.
an obviously political matter.
Incidentally, the Tobago rime vies with Dickory Dock
for the title of the oldest limerick. Both are - said - to be
"over three hundred years old" but no proof of this fact
has been given. They are certainly over a hundred years
old.
There was no plot, and often less humor, in Lear's rimes
Nothing ever seems to have happened in his verses. Indeed
he popularized a rather tiresome system whereby the first
and last lines end in an identical word, as in:
There was an old man of Dundee
Who frequented the top of a tree.
When disturbed by the crows
He abruptly arose
And exclaimed, "I'll return to Dundee!"
Or:
There was a young person of Kew
Whose virtues and vices were few,
But with blamable haste
She devoured some hot paste
(I) A variant to the last line: "Or to a leg, Sir, of mutton you may go."
Here is the context in—Our Mutual Friend—"Give you my honor I never heard
of any man from Jamaica except the man who was a brother," replies Mortimer.
"Tobago then." "Nor yet from Tobago." "Except," Eugene strikes in, "except
our friend who long lived on rice pudding and isinglass till at length to his
something or other, his physician said something else, and a leg of mutton some-
how ended in daygo."
12
Which destroyed the young man of Kew.(l)
(We shall treat a young lady from K^w Jater who was not
the negative person one meets here* and as for a man
from Dundee whom you meet beyond - well he had not
spent - all - his time in a tree), ;
Lear actually compressed lines three and four as follows:
There was an old man of Thermopylae
Who never did anything properly.
But they said, "If you choose to boil eggs in your shoes
You shall never remain in Thermopylae.
The internal rime in the third line, however, was man-
datory even in the quatrain form. Later however he dropped
the compressed form and became more liberal in his rime
scheme obviously leaning more toward examples like this
from Mother Goose's Melodies - altho he seldom forsook
the form where lines one and five echoed each other:
There was an old soldier of Bister
Went walking one day with his sister.
When a cow at one poke
Tossed her into an oak
Before the old gentleman missed her.
Actually Lear did not use the word - limerick -, but
-Rhyme - to describe his verses. There is even some doubt
about the origin of the word itself which is used today to
describe this verse form. Nor is it definitely known when,
where, and how the word came to be associated with the
estimable verse form it describes. Lear died in San Remo
in 1888, and one authority says the word did not come into
use till around 1898.(2) In a Stalky story (The Propaga-
tion of Knowledge) Kipling used the word, but capitalized
(1) Edward Lear—The Book of Nonsense and More Nonsense—London and
New York: Frederick Warne and Company, Ltd., 1894. Lear has just over 200
Nonsense Rhymes to his credit. Most of his verses are typified by what one
critic has called "Lear's Lazy Last Line."
(2) J. R. Esenwein and M. E. Roberts—The Art of Versification—Spring-
field, Mass.: Home Correspondence School, 1920, Rev. Ed. (319 pages).
13
it in obvious reference to the Irish County and Town.(1) In
the story, the admirable Crichton had just recited as proof
of his knowledge of French a verse from Punch:
De tous ces defunts cockolores
Le moral Fenelon.
Miche Ange et Johnson
(Le Docteur) sont les plus awful bores.
When a side kick hummed, "Won't you come up, come
up," in further reference to the popular song. Again in
- Stalky and Company - we find the word used as follows:
". . . . Make a good catchy Limerick, and let the fags
sing it."(2) But again, it is capitalized. If Kipling's tales
are historically correct, the word was in use about 1880 in
connection with the limerick verse form. It does not seem
however to have been widely used in print till around 1898
when a discussion broke out in - Notes and Queries -.
On November 19, 1898, a Query signed M. H. reads
"When and why did nonsense verse as written by Lear ac-
quire the name limerick?" An editorial note appended adds
significantly: "We have not heard this so-called." (!) On
December 10, 1898 J. H. Murray replied and said that non-
sense verses were wrongfully called limericks as that word
applied to verses which had wide circulation in verbal form.
Several authorities like Wood in - The Craft of Poetry -
have failed to distinguish between the history of the verse
form and the etymology of the word used to describe it.
This is understandable in view of the fact that the connec-
tion between the two is incredibly obscure.
After sifting all the evidence it seems that the origin of
the word can definitely be traced to the old Irish song whose
refrain Murray gives in its entirety:
Won't you come up, come up
Won't you come up to limerick?
(1) " . . . . the Army crashed into tea with a new Limerick." The Propa-
gation of Knowledge in—Debits and Credits—by Rudyard Kipling, Charles Scrib-
ners and Sons, 1926 (Volume 31). Note that the book was copyrighted as early
as 1915.
(2) Rudyard Kipling—Stalky and Company—The Flag of Their Country, New
York: Charles Scribncr's Sons, 1900, p. 244.
14
Won't you come up, come up,
Won't you come up to limerick
This chorus was chanted or sung in unison after a member
of a convivial group had sung or recited a short verse which
was usually an extemporaneous and witty composition about
a person or place. No repetitions were allowed and forfeits
were exacted if the individual could not respond with an
appropriate rime in his turn. It would be most interesting
if it could be said that the verse was presented in limerick
form, but no concrete evidence to this end is found. A good
deal of controversy still exists as to the etymology of the
word, and a good deal of obscurity still surrounds it.
I There has been an inane attempt to account for the
I origin of the word by relating it to the obviously coined
| word "learick," deriving probably as a pun from lyric,'but
I I feel this is pedantry in knee breeches.(1) Until better
evidence than the derivation from the Irish song and town
is produced, it is best to consider that as our word source^
even though the connection with the verse form is admittedly
unaccounted for.
It is inter^ting to note that in England in 1863, the
year the enlarged edition of Lear's - Nonsense Rhymes -
appeared, Punch began a campaign to immortalize all place
names in En^lknd with a "rhyme." This commemorative
series lasted two months. Thirty-three verses or rhymes
were recorded in January and February of 1863. Punch then
virtually dropped the verse form till around 1902 when the
literary limerick was revived. This time the word limerick
was used, and the revival undoubtedly laid the groundwork
j for the contest period of the limerick which reached its
| height in 1907-8, just as the earlier verses set a background
j for the vogue of Nonsense Books in 1864 in this country.
In March, 1864 there appeared a book called - The New
Book of Nonsense - which was quickly followed in the
{ same year by - Ye Book of Bubbles - and - Inklings for Think-
*;■ (1) What's Funny and Why—by Wright, and the Encyclopedia
Britannica.
It has also been said that the word derived from a pun on Lear's name.
15
lings. These books of nonsense rimes were closely patterned
in form and illustration after Lear's, and were published
by The Sanitary Commission for the benefit of sufferers
from The Civil War. But they obviously cannot be adduced
in tracing an American source for the verse form. Here is
a typical stanza:
There was a young lady of Eden
Who on apples was quite fond of feedin'.
So she gave one to Adam
Who said "Thank you Madam."
And so they skeedadled from Eden.
Or this one describing the very unsanitary dresses which
my grandfather used to call turd-rollers:
There was a young lady whose gown
Swept clean a great part of the town.
Says she: "I don't care
For the soil or the wear,
I must have this fine sweep to my gown."
As an example of the endless contradictions of which mod -
ern limerology in this puerile vein is made, there is adduced:
There was a young lady from Riga
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They came back from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.(l)
Reed in his - Complete Limerick Book - on page 108 in
a note says he saw this verse on a "puzzle card" dated 1873.
Louis Untermeyer attributes it to William Cosmo Monk-
house, a witty Englishman who was primarily a commenta-
tor on art. Swann - The Making of Verse - says it is at-
tributed to Lewis Carroll. But most authorities who quote
it credit Anon. We see that the futility of probing contro-
versial sources need concern us no more.
(I) Riga has been corrupted to the purer word Niger. See also—The Smile
on the Face of the Tiger—Boston: Bacon and Brown, 1909. Here the verse is
also given in a French translation. The book was reissued by Lippincott, Phila-
delphia, 1921 in expanded form and called—Limericks.
16
W. S. Gilbert could not resist taking a dig at Lear, for
already the form was imitated and burlesqued. The painter's
original verse ran:
There was an old man in a tree
Who was terribly bored by a bee.
When they said, "Does it buzz?"
He replied, "Yes it does!
Its a regular brute of a bee!"
And Gilbert parodied it stiffly as follows:
There was an old man of Dundee
Who was horribly stung by a wasp.
When they asked, "Does it hurt?"
He said, 4 'No, not at all.
It can do it again if it likes!"
As evidence of how early corruption sets in, there is
already found this variant - or perhaps this is the original
of Gilbert's lame duck:
There was an old man of St. Bees
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.
When asked, "Does it hurt?"
He said with a smile,
"I'm so glad it wasn't a hornet!"
But the librettist did not disdain the limerick entirely, for
in "The Sorcerer" we find:
O my name is John Wellington Wells
I'm a dealer in magic and spells,
In blessings and curses
And over-filled purses
In prophecies, witches and knells.
If you want a proved foe to make tracks,
If you'd melt a rich uncle in wax,
You have but to look in
On our resident Djinn
Number 70, Simmery Axe.
Sullivan actually put these verses to music without realizing
till it was called to his attention later that he had been
writing a score for limericks! In ■ The Yeoman of the Guard''
there is also a further exampleof Gilbert and Sullivan's use
17
of the limerick form. Recall:
"A man who would woo a fair maid
Should 'prentice himself to the trade. . . . ." etc.
In The Golden Period of the limerick we find the first
concrete evidence of a division of the verse content which
by now has become an unbridgeable gap. Perhaps Thack-
eray's irreverent lines on James Spedding were among the
first to point the way. At any rate, in the literary division
there are numerous parlor products attributed to Swin-
burne, Rossetti, Ruskin, Browning, Tennyson, and contin-
ued in the pallid 1900's by Gelett Burgess, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Dean Inge (the gloomy), Father Ronald Knox, and
Woodrow Wilson, among countless others. In the ribald,
pornographic, or "dirty" tradition, the limerick had a far
more rapid and vigorous development, but the records of
authorship are blank. Indeed, there has been virtually no
record at all kept of this second division of the limerick, so
that scholarly research into its history and origins is im-
possible. We can only assume that its growth and develop-
ment parallelled that of the inane or nonsense verse, which
is why I have gone to some pains to treat it here for the
first time in literature in a comprehensive manner.
One clue to the birth of a few immortal verses is
found in a rare burlesque magazine called "Light Green",
two issues of which appeared at Cambridge College in 1872.
From this ephemeral publication come the following verses
by the short-lived genius A. C. Hilton, which I have set
beside the popular or present day versions as proof of a
definite if untraceable lineage:
There was a young gourmand of Johns
Who'd a notipn of dining on swans.
To the Backs he took big nets
To Capture the cygnets
But was told they were kept for the Dons
There was a young student, of Johns
Who wanted to buggar the swans,
But the loyal hall porter
Said "Pray take my daughter,
The birds are reserved for the Dons."
18
There was a young critic of Kings
Who had views on limits of things.
With the size of the chapel
He would frequently grapple,
And exclaim, "It is biggish for Kings!"
There was a young fellow of Kings
Whose mind was on heavenly things,
But his heart was afire
For a lad in the choir
Whose ass was like jelly on springs.
In the emasculated tradition is Rudyard Kipling's:
There was a small boy of Quebec
Who was buried in snow to his neck.
When asked, "Are you friz?"
He answered, "lis!
But we don't call this cold in Quebec!"
And later, Woodrow Wilson's favorite:
As a beauty I am not a star.
There are others more handsome by far.
But my face, I don't mind it
For I am behind it.
It's the people in front get the jar!(l)
(I) Attributed to a forgotten poet, Anthony Euwer. It is said to have ap-
peared in his book—Rhymes-of the Valley—and been published in The Pitts-
burgh Index, ca 1898. However in—Limericks—by Florence Herrick Gardiner,
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1921, Richard Burton is credited with it. (This
little
book is interesting because of its attempts to give sources, a matter far too
controversial to merit consideration here, even in such a thorough examination
of
limerology as we are making.)
It is interesting, however, to note how limerick patterns repeat themselves.
Prom—Some Celebrities in Verse—by Patrick Braybrooke, FRSL, London; C. W.
Daniel Co. 1930, (64 pages), I quote:
G. B. S.
Than Shakespeare I'm greater by far.
I am always produced by a star.
My plots he can find ,'em—
For I am behind 'em.
It's 'in front' they don't know what they are!
Each verse about various people from Henry Ford and Charley Chaplin to
Churchill, is followed by a brief note as to why the author felt impelled to
write it. The book is a silly business altogether.
19
The other and more important division of the limerick
is rather less chaste. It is virtually impossible to attribute
authorship to the more salty verses, for they live not among
literateurs, but among the people. This fine example is said
to have been written by Tennyson, though his numerous
poems in an off-color vein were nearly all destroyed shortly
after his death.
There was an old fellow of Brest
Who sucked off his wife with great zest.
Despite her great yowls
He sucked out her bowels
And spat them all over her chest.
This was quite a step from the solemn rubbish of the
- Idylls, -but quite worthy in point of finish and good taste
of a genius of Tennyson's class.
Dean Inge contributed a suggestive one:
There was an old man of Khartoum
Who kept two tame sheep in his room,
To remind him he said,
Of two friends who were dead
But he could not remember of whom.(l)
In this second or ribald division the industrious and
talented-if unknown-poets who picked up the limerick
form soon departed from Lear's formal precedent, just as
they departed from his meaningless nonsense. English
Puritanism which culminated in the tragic neuroticism of
the Post-Victorian or Freudian era resulted in the birth of
numbers of the finest limericks known, for in the simple
limerick one could express a natural and concise reaction
to the baroque morality of Victorianism. Browning, Ten-
nyson, Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Eugene Field, and others
named above are all widely reported to have contrived many
salacious rimes, but now the records of authorship are, as
I have said, obliterated.
(I) Could this old man really be Umm Kulsum? "For her first 30 years she
whored; during the next three decades she pimped for friend and foe; and during
the last third of her life when bedridden by age and infirmity she had a buck
goat and a nanny tied up in her room and solaced herself by watching their
amorous conflicts." Book of—The Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol. 10, p.
169, (note). The Burton Club Edition.
20
In my search for a link between the limerick verse form
and the word I discovered a rare and curious item entitled
- The Pearl -, which contains the earliest printings of the
Th spoken rime I have yet found? - The Pearl - was purportedly
of i a racy periodical issued around 1880. The copies I saw, how-
waj ever, were bound in book form, in three volumes. Volume
a p I which concerns us here is dated 1880, and I would describe
wei it as a reprint (on fine paper) of several issues of a periodical
ap] which I trust was genuine.
" l Tucked in among the lascivious verses and salacious
*or prose tid-bits in - The Pearl - are several groups of limer-
**ei icks under the heading "Nursery Rhymes". The use of the
w0 word "Rhymes" here tends to indicate that the word lim-
erick was apparently not yet widely used in connection with
ori the verse form around 1880, although by 1898 the connect-
Wo ion had somehow been established, as we have already seen.
1 The "Nursery Rhymes" from - The Pearl - are rough
fV] and forthright, but historically very important, for in many
1S cases they are definitive but unpolished forebears of our
ev< present spoken limericks which prove that we are better
UI1 than our fathers. These verses typify the Victorian degen-
eration of pornography from the semi-literary guise of John
ye Cleland to a low unequalled in all our social history. The
ap Victorians, even moreso than the Puritans, hid the foullest
na minds the world has ever seen under a guise of modest
se skirts, an elaborate morality, and other misleading external
wi compensations. Here is a pungency too real to produce
vi: laughter, too unpleasant to be aphrodisiacal, and too bla-
lii tant and unfinished to fit our pleasant modern definitions.
^: -' Because of their unique abstraction from the dim,
background of the spoken limerick, these verses must be
treated as an historical entity. Since they vary from the
the verses I have actually heard spoken, they do not belong
in the body of this book, and I will treat them here in the
B the form of a grim but rich diversion, but all quite inkeep-
ss ing with the high literary and sociological purpose of this
Essay, which is intended to amuse and instruct you in a
sadly neglected facet of our culture.
fo
In
fo
21
Nursery Rhymes from - The Pearl, - Num-
ber 1, January, 1880.
There was a young lady of Troy
Who invented a new kind of joy.
She sugared her thing
Both outside and in,
And then had it sucked by a boy.
There was an old person of Sark,
Who buggared a pig in the dark;
The swine, in surprise,
Murmured, "God blast your eyes,
Do you take me for Boulton or Park?"
There are several variations of the Bombay,
the Ostend, the Calcutta, Dundee, Santander,
and Litchen verses, but they are so close to the
modern version that I am not giving them here.
From - The Pearl -, Number 2, February, 1880.
There was a young lady of Gaza,
Who shaved her cunt clean with a razor;
The crabs in a lump
Made tracks to her rump,
Which proceedings did greatly amaze her.
There was a young farmer of Nant,
Whose conduct was both gay and gallant,
For he fucked all his dozens
Of nieces and cousins,
In addition, of course, to his aunt.
There was an old man of Tantivy,
Who followed his son to the privy
He lifted the lid
To see what he did,
And found that it smelt of Capivi.
There was a young man of this nation,
Who didn't much like fornication;
When asked, "Do you fuck?"
He said, "No I suck
Women'f quims, and I use masturbation.''
22
There was a young parson of Eltham,
Thie Who seldom fucked whores, but oft felt 'em;
Gf a In^ the lanes he would linger,
wasi And play at stick finger,
a pe 'Twas on the way home that he smelt 'em.
were
There was a young lady of Rheims,
-f.f Who was terribly plagued with wet dreams;
fom ^° s**e saved UP a dozen,
_. aj And sent to her cousin,
„r^_ Who ate them and thought they were creams,
wort
There was a gay person of Tooting,
brigi Whose roe was frequently shooting;
wore Till he married a lass
I fe< With a face like my arse,
evidi And a cunt you could put a top-boot in.
is pi
even In addition to the above, there are versions
una< of the Pat, the Siberia, and the Buckingham
verses similar to the spoken ones. - The Pearl -,
■' Number 3, March 1880 contained, among
year others, these:
There was a young man had the art
Of making a capital tart;
With a handful of shit
Some snot and some spit,
app€
nam
serie
were
virti
Uter And he'd flavor the whole with a fart.
was
for t
heig
fort
There was an old parson of Lundy,
Fell asleep in his vestry on Sunday
He awoke with a scream,
"What another wet dream!
] This comes of not frigging since Monday.
Bool
sam< There was an old man of the mountain,
Who frigged himself into a fountain;
( Fifteen times had he spent
,f has Still he wasn't content,
He simply got tired of the counting.
23
In - The Pearl - of April, 1880, Number 4,
we find further verses with archaic terms in
them indicating that they were quite current
during the last century.
A parson who lived near Gremorne
Looked down on all women with scorn
E'en a boy's fat white bum
Gould not make him come:
But an old man's piles gave him the horn.
A cheerful old party of Lucknow,
Remarked, "I should just like a fuck now!"
So he had one and spent,
And said, "I'm content;
By no means am I so cunt-struck now."
There was a young man of Newminster Court,
Buggar'd a pig, but his prick was too short;
Said the hog, "It's not nice;
But pray take my advice;
Make tracks or by the police you'll be caught."
There was a young man of Cashmere,
Who purchased a fine Bayadere;
He fucked all her toes,
Her mouth, eyes, and her nose
And eventually poxed her left ear.
There was a young man of King's Cross,
Who amused himself frigging a horse;
Then licking the spend
Which still dripped from the end.
Said, "It tastes just like anchovy sauce."
There was a young girl from Vistula,
To whom a friend said, " Jef has kissed you, la!"
Said she, "Yes by God!
But my arse he can't sod,
Because I'm troubled with fistula."
24
In - The Pearl- of May, 1880, Number 5, I shall
only pick out the verses which seem to me
7 unique:
ol There was a young woman of Cheadle
w Who once gave the clap to a beadle,
a She said, "Does it itch?"
w "It does, you dammed bitch,
»1 And it burns like hell-fire when I peedle."
if
fc There was an old Chinamen drunk
d( Who went for a sail in his junk,
w He was dreaming of Venus,
And tickling his penis,
Till he floated away in the spunk.
W( There was a young man of Rangoon
Who farted and filled a balloon.
The balloon went so high
That it stuck in the sky.
ev< And stank out the man in the moon,
un
There was a young parson of Harwich
ye. Tried to grind his betrothed in a carriage.
ap She said, "No, you young goose,
na Just try self-abuse.
sei And the other we'll try after marriage."
we
There was a young parson of Goring,
Hf Who made a small hole in the flooring.
He lined it all around,
wa
* . Then laid on the ground,
j. And declared it was cheaper than whoring,
for
Bo<
sar
ev
is
it h.
25
And finally in - The Pearl - of June, 1880,
Nutnber 6, there are the last of these unusual
verses from another era.
There was a young lass of Delkeith
Who frigged a young man with her teeth;
She complained that he stunk
Not so much from the spunk,
But his arsehole was just underneath.
There was a gay parson of Norton,
Whose prick, although slick was a short 'un;
To make up for this loss
He had balls like a horse,
And never spent less than a quartern.
A cabman who drove in Biarritz,
Once frightened a fare into fits;
When reprov'd for a fart
He said, "God bless my heart,
When I break wind I usually shits."
A young woman got married at Chester,
Her mother she kissed and she blessed her.
Says she, "You're in luck,
He's a stunning good fuck,
For I've had him myself down in Leicester".
While well-known if suddenly modest poets were at
work on various limericks, and unknown troubadours were
spreading the more vigorous forms of the verse far and wide,
a great public boom in refined limerick-contests began a-
round 1907-8 both in England and America. This vogue as
much as anything spread the basic pattern of the limerick
among the people who were quick to grasp its expressive
potentialities. As a result of these contests and their wide-
spread pornographic offshoots, scholarly Oliver Herford soon
had good cause to remark that the verse form was wasting
its inherent sweetness in riotous ribaldry. This whole un-
fortunate period in the limerick's history can be summed
up by quoting a contest limerick from the Cleveland Press.
26
Tens of thousands of dollars were given as prizes. The win-
ning last line was contributed by one Joseph Glassner, and
This actually took a purse of $11,005.00:
°f a c A girl who wore her socks rolled
wasu Caught a turrible, turrible cold.
Itlre "Aha," said her Dad,
appr "I almost feel glad
if it < And here it is, $11,005.00 worth:
form
"' When I see Susie sneeze so ice cold.'Vl)
deal
wore Actually the unknown poet was much more concerned
about Susie's knees and upwards, than about her cold, to
origi wit:
wore There was a young mate of a lugger
I fe Who took out a girl just to hug her.
fv™ "I've my monthlies," she said,
is p -And a cold in the head,
ever
una But my bowels work well......do you buggar?"
The contest vogue lingered on into the '30's, and a hand-
yea book on how to win limerick contests finally appeared which
apt gave a brief history of the limerick, among other pointers.(2)
nai Except for sporadic attempts by advertising men to stage
ser another sucessful revival of the game, the period is over,
for by and large no more huge prizes are offered. One of
jjt< the last fitful sputters of the contest limerick occurred in
Wa 1925. Shaemas J. A. Witherspoon conceived-------"the
foi glimerick"-------a limerick puzzle, which was presented as
he follows:
fo1 ADDING MACHINE WRECKS LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM
« (I) Milton Wright—What's Funny and Why—Whittlcsely House,
McGraw
Hill, 1939 (284 pages), p. 55 and following deal with the limerick.
sa
(2) Kenneth R. Close, "How to Win Prize Winning Limericks," University
of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, 1930. 25c, 8 pages not numbered. This pam-
phlet was inspired by a series of contest limericks in Liberty magazine.
27
There was a young cashier of.......
(town of France on the Straits of Dover)
Whose accounts, when reviewed wouldn't . . . .
(balance)
Soon his chief smelt a.....
(large rodent)
For he'd furnished a......
(apartment)
And was seen every night at the......(1)
(dance, involving a number of performers).
A prize of $100 was offered for the best Glimerick, but the
whole venture proved abortive, and was soon forgotten.
And yet strange if slowly collapsing conceptions of moral-
ity prevented any actual record of the the really basic lim-
erick from appearing till Norman Douglas belatedly took
the situation in hand in 1928-9.
The effect more particularly of World War I than
World War II on the development of the so-called *'dirty"
limerick cannot be overlooked. The millions of men dragged
from their homes and usually suppressed moral back-
grounds, and concentrated miserably in opposite camps,
were not fired with enough glorious sentiments to last out
the whole war. The soldiers' ennui was livened with story
and rime. An extensive pornography was born in the Armies
of all nations which with the consequent breakdown of
bourgeois morality spread the limerick deeper and farther
into our culture. There have been countless volumes on
the superficial aspects of war, the battles etc., but the re-
cord of the incredible pornography resulting from the com-
merce of armies and concomitant moral looseness is vir-
tually blank.(2) There was a lift and a spirit of popular
enthusiasm about World War I which resulted in the crea-
tion of numbers of new limericks. There was more move-
Ill The Glimerick Book—containing new and original Glimericks or Mystifying
Limericks by Shaemas J. A. Witherspoon, F.R.LS. The Glimerick Publishing Com-
pany, 342 Madison Ave., New York, 1925. (66 pages). Quotation from p. 45.
(2) See—The Sexual History of the World War—by Dr. Magnus Hirschfield,
New York: Cadillac Publishing Company, 1941 (352 pages). Especially Chapter
4, "Sensuality in the Trenches," and Chapter II, "Civilian Debauchery Back
Home." This is a most basic work.
28
Tl
of
w<
a
w<
ai
if
fc
d<
w
w
I
e
ii
e
VI
>"
i
ment in World War II and the men had none of the spir-
itual effluvia of their fathers. Nor were there any great or
novel changes in morality taking place during World War
II for by 1940 the arteries thru which our humanity courses
had already hardened to the point where the public could
breakfast on the atom bomb without turtiing an eye. As a
result, recent years saw more of a rehashing of earlier gems
than birth of new ones. In either case, the contents of the
limericks preserved by veterans tell us how men amused
themselves in the long horrible waits of which modern pol-
itical wars are made:
There was a young Royal Marine
Who tried to fart "God Save the Queen!"
When he reached the soprano
Out came the guano
And his breeches weren't fit to be seen!
That the popular interest in the limerick remains at a
high pitch is exemplified by an article called A Century of
Limericks(l) which appeared in The New York Times. The
paper was so flooded with suggested verses by readers that
a few weeks later it published an article called Limerick
Addenda(2). The original briefly reviewed the history of
the limerick, and mentioned don Marquis' classification of
limericks: those which can be told to ladies, those which
can be told to the clergy, and just limericks. The author
went on to say that due to new license being extended to
the modern female, the classification was no longer exact.
It need not be concealed that there are several very fine
contributions to the present volume from female sources.
Here are a couple of The Times' verses:
There was a young lady of Joppa
Whose friends all decided to drop her.
She went with a friend
On a trip to Ostend
And the rest of the story's improper.
(1) A Century of Limericks—by H. I. Brock, New York Times, Magazine Sec-
tion. November 17, 1946. (Pages 23, 53)
(2) Limerick Addenda, New York Times, Magazine Section, December 8, 1946.
(Pages 38-39)
29
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were caught so what could they do.
Said the fly, "Let us flee!"
Said the flea, "Let us fly!"
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
It is the persistence of such nonsense as this that has ac-
centuated the need for a volume to present the limerick in
its true social dimensions.
(It would have been possible to expand the study of the
so-called nonsense verse to some extent, but the topic is
dull, repetitive, and fruitless. Merely for the sake of the
record which is so incomplete, I ani listing below certain
volumes I have consulted, but which are so vapid that in
general I have refrained from working them into footnotes
as I have other authorities consulted.)
(1) Random Rhymes—by (Harry Parkes), London, F. Warnc & Co. 188?.
(2) The Limerick Up To Date Book—Ethel Watts Mumford, Illustrated by
Ethel Watts Mumford and Addison Mizner, San Francisco, Paul Elder & Co.
1903, (109 pages).
(3) 700 Limerick Lyrics—selected and arranged by Stanton Vaughn, Carey
Stafford Co. New York, 1906, (160 pages).
(4) Lyrics Pathetic and Humorous, from A to Z—by Edmund Dulac, F.
Warne & Co. London, 1908. (24 pages).
(5) Nonsense Book, A Collection of Limericks—Susan Hale, Marshall Jones,
1919. (38 pages).
(6) .A Little More Nonsense—Henry Robert Randall Davies, Kensington, The
Cayme Press, 1923, 48 pages, illustrated with woodcuts. (Davies also wrote—
A Lyttel Book of Nonsense—Cayme Press, Kensington, 1925, new edition, and—
Less Eminent Victorians—London, 1927, (64 pages).
(7) The Complete Limerick Book—by Langford Reed, Jarrolds, London, 1925,
137 pages, illustrated. (Reed also edited—Mr. Punch's Limerick Book—which had
a foreword by A. P. Herbert, and was illustrated by G. S. Sherwood in 1934.
In 1937 he published—My Limerick Book—illustrated by Joyce Dennys, London,
T. Nelson and Sons Ltd. 159 pages; as well as—The New Limerick Book—40 il-
lustrations by Batchelor, London, H. Jenkins, 95 pages.)
(8) A Bouquet of Choice Limericks—by W. L. Washburn, The Palmetto
Press, Audubon, N. J. 1926.
(9) Peter Pauper's Limerick Book—Peter Beilenson, compiler, Peter Pauper
Press, Mt. Vernon, N. Y. 1940, (83 pages).
(10) All This and Bevin Too—by Quentin Crisp, with drawings by Mervyn Peak,
London: Nicholson & Watson, 1943. (28 pages).
(11) The Little Book of Limericks—H. I. Brock, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc.
New York, 1947, (117 pages).
30
onj
WO]
I f
evi
is J
eve
un:
III
Th One of the tragic things about a great book of folk
of i songs like - Immortalia, - for example, is that it presents
waj mainly fragments of poems—unrounded snatches where
a p finished popular verses might have stood had it not been
wei for the false-to-humanity tenets of puritanism and the
api consequent purges and censorings. Norman Douglas says
if i that the limerick as a verse form is a belated but definite
for product of puritanical repression. Indeed since so many
des are clerical in nature, they may also be something of a
wo protest against protestantism, historically speaking. This
matter of protestantism and its aphrodisiacal effect on
limerology is one of the main reasons why Latin and Cath-
olic races cannot appreciate such concise literature. If you
recite for a Frenchman:
II y avait un jeune homme de Dijon
Qui n'avait que peu de religion.
II dit, "Quant a moi,
Je deteste tous le trois,
he Pere, et le Fils et le Pigeon."
he will look at you drily and uncomprehendingly, not
yes knowing whether he heard you correctly or not. To show
ap] just how silly a French limerick can be one might adduce
nai George du Maurier's:
ser II etait un homme de Madere
we: Qui frappe le nez a son pere.
vir On demandait, "Pourquoi?"
H* II repondit, "Ma foi!
wa Vous n'avez pas connu mon pere!"
for Which might be roughly rendered as follows:
ke^ A young man from Madras arose
f°r And punched his progenitor's nose.
When people asked, "Why?"
B0 He responded, "My eye,
sal You don't know the old man I suppose!"(l)
(I) Quoted and translated in slightly different form in The Cult of the
Limerick, Cornhill Magazine, London, 1918, Volume 44, (pp 158-166) on p. 160.
The article traces limerology as it developed in the English Universities, and
is
signed C. L. G.
31
It t
This is a fundamentally humorless situation at best. In
either language it plainly shows us that the French mind
and tongue do not have the concise epigrammatic quality
required of the limerick; and even if they did possess it, II
there are still so many national traits inherently against |
them that they could do nothing permanent with this
brisk verse form.
A Spaniard would be shocked if you should translate a
verse like:
There was a young girl of Spitzbergen
Whose people all thought her a virgin,
Till they found her in bed
With her quim very red
And the head of a kid just emergin!
Latin races, for all their precocious concupiscence and
sodomistic tendencies regard such things as dirty. If you
explain that all such 'dirt' is the outcome of protestant
theories of life, in a reactionary form, they will suggest
that you should become a Roman Catholic, as its tenets
are cleaner and saner, and require no such coarse external
compensations. "Catholics" they say, "do not require such
ambiguous outlets." But even though they may profess not
to "require" them, many feel that they should nevertheless
have them, if just for the good of society.(1)
One living limerick is worth a dozen dead saints as an
indicative landmark in our basic cultural history. The
primarily Mediterranean peoples who made saints through
their blind intolerant beliefs had no outlets like limerology
for their bitter intemperance. Such indulgences were until
recent years reserved to the clergy in France and Italy.
Furthermore the Latin races are notoriously under-
nourished, and empty stomachs are hostile to any such
jovial full-blooded expression as the limerick.
(I) For example if you would check the criminal records in New York City
you would see that the percentage of Catholics indicted is several times greater
than the population percentage of Catholics to other religious groups. Eg. 64%
of New York delinquents were R.C.'s altho the R.C. constitute only 20% of the
population. See Converted. Catholic Magazine, November, 1945, p. 227.
32
The Germans, ponderous in their wit because of the
elephantine gait of their language, and sadistic in their
humorless outlook on their attempts to copy outside ideas,
This could scarcely be expected to do much better than the
of a Latins. Here is a German verse indicative of what I mean:
was1 Es steht ein Elefant am Titicaca See
a Pei Der steht und hebt sein Schwanzlein in die Hoeh.
were Laura, Laura, wenn ich bei dir steh
app* So geht's mir's wie dem Elefant am Titicaca See.(l)
xt And a literal translation:
torn An elephant stood on the shore of lake Titicaca
deal He stood and lifted his trunk (lit. little tail) up in
wor< the air.
Laura, Laura, when I stand beside you
brigi The same thing happens to me
wor< As happened to the elephant by lake Titicaca.
I *e There is no cloying, academic flavor about good limer-
ev*d icks, for they were not conceived for the abstruse delecta-
isP tion of refined minds. They have a harmonious and a
ever homely ring, and are repeated wherever English is spoken,
una They are a bond truer even than the bond of the English
language, for they form a convivial bond of spirit, remind-
yeai xn& one °f common ties, duties, and ancestry. Can such
app specifically English verses be a sign of decadence? Indeed
nan not! They are a symbol of our strength, our virility, and
seri our vitality. Life can never be castrated by any postal reg-
wer ulations or censorship boards composed of impotent and
virt self-centered minds. Such rules and such Regulatory
lite bodies may curb swindlers and crooks here and there, may
was even emasculate some of the superficial aspects of our cul-
for ture f°r brief periods, but life itself goes on. If this were
hei n<>t true, these verses would not have come to my notebook
fOT as naturally as they did. We tend to react disproportion-
ately with increasing violence to non-human restrictions
as they are being applied and enforced upon unwilling and
®0< still essentially free individuals by governments reputed to
sar be of, by, and for the people but which are coming more
It h
(I) From the novel—Infanterist Perhobstler—by William Michael.
33
and more to represent special interests. The phrasing, re-
peating and polishing of the limerick by millions of people
is one way they still have of reacting to the personal re-
strictions which each age seems to impose with increasing-
ly narrower bounds upon the individual.
Indeed, one reason I am impelled to this project is be-
cause the day seems close at hand when the only freedom
remaining to the individual will be that little sour dribble
specifically legislated to him by the powers his ancestors
set up which grew to devour him. The regimented and
cannibalistic state will prove even more intolerant of
sociological and basic cultural records than "society" is
today, but a few copies of this history may be miraculous-
ly preserved to enlighten the dawn of the new atomic age.
The limerick itself however, unlike other less permanent
facets of our culture continues to flourish during the final
cataclismic reactions or revolutions which periodically
readjust our indicated morality and discrepant behavior.
Its life has been therefore quite continuous for over 100
years and no matter what happens to the record, the verses
themselves will live on.
The anonymity of the limerick is at once a blessing
and a disguise, for no one would dare any longer to claim
authorship of such pointed digs at an elaborate false
morality which pious self-righteous individuals with no
conception of man's true nature are trying blindly to en-
force. Its anonymity makes it almost impossible to trace,
makes its history legendary and confusing, and leaves the
scholar baffled in his pursuit of origins nine times out of
ten, except when a broad sociological approach is used as
here.
34
IV
This
of ac
wasu
a per
were
appr
if it
fortr
deal
wor<
orig
wor
I U
evic
isr
eve
urn
yes
ap
na
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vii
\ Ul
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fc
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E
s
While one cannot do a great deal about tracing the
history of limerick lore, except to speculate futilely from
internal evidence, it is possible, however, to look into some
of the interesting technicalities and formalities which have
sprung up about the basic limerick as it is repeated by
millions and millions of English speaking people today.
The variations in meter, rime, and form, the problem of
alternate lines and their authentication, can be fruitfully
commented on. There is also the problem of the expansion
of the original strict form to include verb endings and
forced rimes, as well as the matter of topic and use of the
four letter words upon which scholarly work can be done.
The true limerick has a relatively strict discipline both
as to meter, rime, and punctuation. It is rather like a bur-
lesque of the epigram, but the single thought of the epi-
gram is broken up into an almost syllogistic form, and
the apogee is nearly always reached in the last word or
words of the last line as inescapably as in any conclusively
logical proposition. Like a good joke, the good limerick
has sustained suspense with most of its punch in the last
line like a kind of comic whiplash. Here and there a
variant is encountered, such as the anticlimactic:
There was a fat lady of Bryde
Whose shoestring once came untied;
She didn't dare stoop
For fear she would poop
And so she cried, and cried, and cried.
Or the rare extra line, like the immortal Skinner:
There was a young fellow named Skinner
Who had a young girl up to dinner;
At quarter past nine
They sat down to dine
At half-past nine it was in her,
(The dinner. Not Skinner. Skinner
The sinner was in her before dinner.)
35
Reed in his — Complete Limerick Book — says that
the chief requirement of a good limerick is a good last line,
but adds that a good rime and effective plot are also es-
sential. Wright gives further points that make up a good
last line in his — What's Funny and Why — : the surprise;
puns; alliterations; wit; and mechanical devices. Of all
these, the people seem to prefer the first, the surprise, the
best.
Earlier authorities have said that the form of the lim-
erick was fixed giving a man's name, his occupation, or
his home, or otherwise identifying him in the first line.
The second line qualified or characterized him in some
way. Lines three and four asked a question about him or
his actions, while the fifth line answered the question or
otherwise concluded the proposition. This rather narrow
form soon gave way to a broader one. And yet until The
Silver Age of elaborations was well under way the inven-
tion of purely imaginary places or names for use in the
rime remained an unworthy artifice. The limerick has
never been a static form, so the literature now includes
some examples of amazing ingenuity, though such aca-
demic fancies are not found in the more basic or spoken
verses. Here is a bit of cleverness:
An amorous M. A.
Says that Cupid that C. D.
Doesn't cast for his health,
But is rolling in wealth,
He's the John Jaco — B. H.
This extreme search for novelty and the attempt to cap-
ture the pungency of the real verse form was carried a£ far
as this:
There was a young lady of Diss
Who said, "Now I think that skating is bliss!"
This no more she will state
For a wheel off her skate
•Slip 93[T1 §UUp9UIOS dn pU9 J31J 3pBJ/^
36
ai
it
s<
w
V:
li
v
f
1
i
Meantime however on the same rime, the soul of the
people breathed and we got:
There was an aesthetic young miss
Who thought it the apex of bliss
To jazz herself silly
With the bud of a lilly
Then go to the garden and piss!
A visit to any medical school's collection of objects re-
moved from over-aesthetic ladies' vaginas will conclusively
prove that the popular poet knew whereof he sang. Nearly
every good limerick has somewhere a reason for being. The
better the reason, the less ingenious the form has to be,
for the topic is actually that much closer to the people
and their (often hidden) folk-problems.
What is the purest and most expressive limerick form ?
It is probably found in an exquisite verse like:
There was a young parson from Kings
Whose mind was on heavenly things
But his heart was afire
For a lad in the choir
Whose ass was like jelly on springs.
Or with some metrical variation in the musical:
In the Garden of Eden lay Adam
Complacently stroking his Madam.
He chuckled with mirth
For he knew that on earth
There were only two balls and he had 'em!
Th. „„. poertc form wou.d probab., scan a, foUcs:
37
Altho the Adam limerick does not scan according to
the true pattern - that is with the first, second, and fifth
line consisting of an iambic followed by two anapestic
feet, and the third and fourth line of two anapests - it is
a typical example of a poem so highly polished that in
spite (^ the flaw of the descending rime, it stands as a
classical example of the purest folk poetry.
In using the iamb for the first of the three feet in the
first, second and fifth lines, I am fully aware of the formal
definition of a limerick. This says it consists of five an-
apestic lines, with three anapests in each of lines one, two,
and five, with only two anapests in lines three and four.
The Kings verse paced so would run something like this:
There was once a young parson from Kings
Whose whole mind was on heavenly things
But his heart was afire
For a lad in the choir
Whose round ass was like jelly on springs.
The use of this dictionary limerick definition gives the
verse a flatulency and a pedantic touch its purer form does
not have. If you will scan lyric after lyric you will be im-
pressed by the unknown poet's persistent use of the iam-
bic foot. And you come to agree that the popular, stream-
lined rhythm used by the people is one which we must
present as the typical one. Its conciseness speaks for its
homely, practical origin.
But there is dissension from this point of view. Strong
in his — Common Sense About Poetry, — gives another
metrical form. He scans this verse by Lear:
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."
as follows:
I disagree entirely with this breakdown. A single short or
a single long foot is rarely found in English verse. Besides
this scanning makes dactyllic verse, and there is absolute-
Thii jy no consistent authority anywhere else in the literature
of a for such a stand.(l)
Strong however partially recoups his error by stating
quite sensibly that any metrical breakdown of the limer-
0™ ick should be considered a mere nominal scheme for refer-
app
II n ence only.
fori Later he also adds that any meter given for the limerick
dea should not be allowed to bully one into giving certain syl-
woi lables any unnatural values. I recall that he says the man
from Khartoum, the gloomy Dean's friend,
was
a p€
wer
S:
Kept TWO TAME SHEEP in his ROOM.
oris
woi
If In the normally spoken line there is the extra accented or
evi long foot quite outside the usual limerick pattern, but the
is i extra accent is obviously necessary for a correct emphasis
eve in reading. In the Foreword to his little book - Ninety-five
un Limericks - John Falmouth also states that "the limerick
is composed of dactyls. The dactyl is a perfect phallic
symbol (— ^ ^) far more anatomically complete than
ye Cleopatra's Needle . . . ."(2) However, I believe we have
ap shown that such a metrical analysis of the limerick is
na
wrong.
se
w<
vi
Hi
w
fC (2) Ninety-five Limericks—A contribution to the Folk
Lore of Our Time,
h Collected and Edited by John Falmouth, The Limerick Press,
Suffern, New York,
{<- 1932. Douglas' verses and a few others presented without
comment, and in the
following manner:
No. XV
U There was a young fellow from Buckingham
Wrote a pamphlet on women and XXXXing 'em.
But a clever ycurig Turk
Eclipsed this great work
With a volume on XXX holes and XXXXing 'em.
39
(I) Note, however, that the Encyclopedia Britannica says that the meter
of a good limerick remains faultlessly dactylic thruout. This is obvious error,
as if it is dactylic it is far from faultless.
The Kings, the Adam and the beard verses are all
punctuated according to the classical pattern. The second
line usually ends in a period, though it sometimes could
be a semi-colon (Lear usually uses one). The last line
should logically end with an exclamation point, for its em-
phasis and full stop values, but most often the printer fur-
ishes a period.
Many fine limericks incorporate quotations or quo-
tation marks, which in the printed form in many cases
seems to result in misplacing an otherwise natural em-
phasis. A good limerick should have the consecutive fluency
of conversational prose. But in print some of this fluency
may be lost, and a good limerick may look poorly. The
best rule to follow when a lyric looks unsymmetrical in
print, is to read it aloud to renew its music:
There was a young lady at sea
Who said, "God how it hurts me to pee!"
'T see," said the mate,
"That accounts for the state
Of the captain, the purser and me."(l)
In rendering folk music the great composers may take
many liberties with no unusual consequences. In perpetu-
ating a basic folk poetry like the limerick, however, the
printed word itself often takes unfortunate rythmical li-
berties which there is no real way of avoiding. Some of
the apparent strangeness in many verses when seen in
print is also due no doubt to the fact that the eye is no
longer used to seeing the four letter words - a matter which
is discussed beyond. The transcriber of the limerick can-
not like the transcriber of folk tunes, improve on the raw
material. His efforts to polish only spoil the pure simplic-
ity of the spoken word, and add a touch of pedantry, and
sometimes even of pornography. To change the limerick
from its spoken to a scholarly tradition now almost
seems to render artificial and decadent something that
from its inception was natural and healthy. The limerick
(I) Frank Harris—My Life—Volume II, Nice, France, 1925, Privately Printed,
p. 362.
40
only began to fester under the comparatively recent reg-
imentation of unnatural moral codes and censorship which
prevented the concurrent growth of the written record.
We come now to the matter of rime. A good limerick
should above all have a natural rime, otherwise it sounds
jejune or forced, like the product of adolescents experi-
menting at versification, but who know not with what
great cultural forces they are tampering. And yet some
very rough rimes have a guise of popular acceptability:
There was a young xnan from Asia
Who notched his cock with a razor.
He made it so rough
He scuffed the tough muff
Of Brenda Diana Duff Frazier.
The last line of the above boarding scdool product, a
most naturally euphonious one, also brings up the matter
of internal rimes. The normal rime pattern of the limer-
ick is always A, A, B, B, A. This is many times made more
musical by the inclusion of extra riming words, sometimes
on a schematic and sometimes on a random or coinciden-
tal basis as above. A prime example of such assonance,
carried to an almost ludicrous extreme is:
There was a lude nude from Bermuda
Who was shrewd, but I proved to be shrewder.
She said, "It is lewd
To be screwed in the nude."
But I grew lewder, and shrewder, and screwed her.
The problem of rime — or better its challenge — has
resulted in the appearance of many wholly experimental
poems, mostly however confined to the more frothy or
parlor verses which can be printed:
A lachrymose lady from Sioux
Whose lover was sadly untrioux
Refused to believe
She couldn't retrieve
Her lover by crying bioux hioux.(l)
(I) The Art of Versification—p. 264.
41
Or Eugene Field's:
Now what in the world shall we dioux
With the bloody and murdering Sioux,
Who some time ago
Took his arrow and bow,
And raised such a hellabelioux.(l)
There is also the awful:
There was an old maid from Wemyss
Who it semyss was troubled with dremyss
She awoke in the night
In a terrible fright,
And shook the bemyss of the house with her scremyss.
Which is closely related to the more basic Worcester verse,
0. V.
While on the topic of rimes we should mention the
device of alliteration. In the emasculated tradition certain
verses have developed which are nothing more than alliter-
ative tongue twisters. Such verses are usually inane. Take
for example:
A canner exceedingly canny
One morning said to his granny,
"A canner can can
Anything he can,
But a canner can't can a can, can he?"(2)
(I) From page 64 of—Limerick Lyrics, selected and arranged by Stanton
Vaughn, New York, T. J. Carey and Company, 435 West 27th Street, 1904. This
book contains some' marvelous examples of the forced limerick—page after page of
verses like:
There once was a wary prof,
Who captured a youthful trans.
He said, "Son, don't lie—Aren't you stealing a pie?"
But the lad said, "I am not a conf."
(2) Attributed by Esenwein in—The Art of Versification (p. 264) to James
H. Hubbard. The verse is found under Carolyn Wells' name in her book:—The
Book of Humorous Verse—Halycon House, New York, 1941. Untermeyer in "Good
Old Limericks," Good Housekeeping, December, 1945, also credits Carolyn Wells.
42
Th
of:
wa
at
we
ap
if i
foi
de
we
or
W(
I
ev
is
ev
ui
y<
a
n
s<
V
V
1
\
i
Or this often quoted tongue twister:
A tutor who tooted the flute
Tried to teach two young tooters to toot.
Said the two to the tutor,
"Is it harder to toot, or
To tutor two tooters to toot?"
This variant to the above is also found:
A Teuton who tooted4 in Newton,
Bought a new flute to toot a salute, on.
The salute 'vas no goot'
For the flute wouldn't toot
Just to suit the astute Newton Teuton.(l)
One seldom if ever finds such falsely nimble poetry bub-
bling up from the great cauldron of the people. The un-
known poet seldom has time for the exercise of such glib
scholarly ingenuity. As a rule he disdains the puns, tricks,
and inconsistencies of the English language which can be
channeled into limerology by idle minds intent on poetical
burlesque.
The beginning of many limericks undoubtedly roots
in the natural music of the rime. The pungent four letter
words so frequently on the tongues of the people are nat-
urally accented with a long foot. They are often the may-
poles of limerology around which lesser words perform a
merry dance. Then too, certain place names have an
inherent poetic charm about them: Devizes, sizes, prizes,
what could be more natural, melodic, more challenging?
Certainly none of the world's great poets could resist such
music, so how much less the people's poet!
That it is the music of the rime that carries and im-
mortalizes and fixes the limerick on our popular tongue is
conclusively shown by this lame duck:
There was a lovely young miss
Who went down to the river to read.
A young man in a punt
Stuck an oar in her eye
And now she has to wear glasses!
(I) From—The Sphinx and the Mummy by Carol Vox, (pseud, lor William
Houghton Sprague.) Illus. by H. Boylston Dunamer. H. M. Caldwell Co. NY,
1909, (64 pages). An inane work.
43
Some limericks are in dialect, and depending on the
false rime and rhythm of the colloquialism to carry them
over into the realm of poetry, appear to have a wholly
studied or false air about them. The people seldom parody
themselves. A lyric like the following seems to be an al-
most untoward projection of the verse form imposed upon
a rather callow situation by an eclectic versifier:
There was an old girl of Silesia
Who said, "As my cunt doesn't please yer,
You might as well come
Up my slimy old bum,
So Jimmy the tapeworm don't seize yer!"(l)
As a rule each limerick is quite self-contained. A great
majority follow the traditional Lear pattern in the first
line - "There was a young (old) man from-----" or "There
was a young (old) man named-----." Of recent years, or
we are forced to assume recent years because all the natural
place and proper names were soon used up - there has
been a crop of verses where the first line is quite different
from the traditional one, even ending in a verb, adverb,
or adjective. One example of the cruel, unjustified forcing
of the limerick to increase its scope is seen in this example
from - Immortalia, - which adds the quite still-born word
' Gutter" to our tongue:
When she wanted a new way to futter;
He greased her behind up with butter
In went his jock
With a terrible sock
And they carried her home on a shutter.
The problem of alternative lines is definitely a big one
in the field of limerology. While I have tried to give these
in some cases, it is impossible to indicate them all. Very
often in transmission thru the various social channels of
the people, the work of the unknown poet becomes botched.
(I) Obviously the last line omits, colloquially, the words "lut just be
careful, etc.
44
Th
of <
wa|
at
we;
apt
if
foi
de
w<
or
w(
I
e\
is
ev
ui
y<!
a
n
s«
V
V
1
\
1
1
1
Perhaps a line is inadvertently forgotten and a substitute
hurriedly devised. It is usually a long, long time before
the substitute is polished to the same state of perfect in-
evitability as the original. Sometimes a basic verse exists
in two distinct forms :(1)
There was a young monk from Siberia
Who daily grew wearier and wearier;
He rose from his cell
With a hell of a yell
And eloped with the Mother Superior.
There was a young monk from Siberia
Who had a complex inferior;
He did to a nun
What he shouldn't have done
And now she's a Mother Superior.
Many of the extant variations seem to come from the
attempts of humorists to clean up folk verse for use in so-
called polite or mixed company. Conversely many come
from the efforts of the people to breathe new life back into
some poor corrupted form. This interchange is clearly
seen in:
There *was a young lady from Ealing
Who had a peculiar feeling;
She lay on her back That she was a fly
And opened her crack And wanted to try
And pissed all over the To walk upside down on the
ceiling. ceiling.
The topic of the limerick seems to be infinitely broad.
For the reactionary reasons discussed earlier, the subject
of most limericks is intercourse with abnormalities racing
close behind. The limerick most relentlessly probes every-
thing sacred to the prude from sex to religion. Quite a few
limericks deal v^ith (and it must be recorded) originate
u—*«► Ust line
(I) From—Immortalia—and—Anecdota American*. An alternate last
to the first one; has our weary monk buggaring the Mother .Superior- . Another
him buggaring the Father Superior.
45 *
line
has
with the clergy. Some limericks are as bitterly sacrilegious
as Maldoror. There must be a horribly irreverent attitude
inherent in a good many people to produce and preserve
such a virulent piece as:
There was a young fellow called Cary
Who got fucking the Virgin Mary.
And Christ was so bored
At seeing Ma whored
That he set himself up as a fairy.
But the sacrilegious limerick refuses to die out. Nothing
is holy to all the people. Each ethnological segment of the
race delights in parodying and ridiculing what the next
group holds sacred, whethet it be the church, love, mar-
riage, the family, normality, or even freedom of thought.
The sacrilegious limerick, like all other topical divisions of
the verse form* exists in various states of concentrated
virulence Here are a couple of the milder ones, the first of
which has been attributed to Dean Inge:
Your verses, dear friend, I surmise,
Were not meant for clerical eyes.
The Vicar and Dean r
Can't tell what they mean,
And the Bishop's aghast with surprise.
God's plan made a hopeful beginning,
But man spoiled his chances by sinning.
We trust that the story
Will end in God's glory,
But at present, the other side's winning.
46
V
A false euphemism especially connected with our uni-
versal four letter words which are mouthed daily by mil-
lions has been one of the reasons limerology has not been
put on a scholarly basis before this. The futility of censor-
ing and aborting our cinema and our literature while the
spoken word and human actions go their quite separate
ways is a vast enigma. But names persist. Sir Richard
Burton says:
There are three stages for names of things and
acts sensual* First we have the — mot cru, — the
popular term, soon followed by the technical and
scientific, and lastly, the literary or figurative nom-
enclature, which is often much more immoral be-
cause more attractive, suggestive and seductive than
the 'raw word.' And let me observe that the highest
civilization is now (1886) returning to the language
of nature.(l)
And indeed this has been true. The people and the
revered poets of each generation have a real fling with the
limerick, and they definitely use the language of nature.
But curious misapplied moral regulations would lead one
to believe that people - are - a lot better than they - talk -
and - act. - Just how ridiculous this business is of making
the word more of a test than the act is witheringly given
in the poem "The Ode to the Four Letter Words" by the
illustrious poet Anon. I present it here just as I have
culled it from the public records because of its importance
in showing how used we are to talking all around the
point, and how by contrast the limerick with its una-
bashed frankness is a healthy expression of a healthy
humor:
(I) The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The Burton Club Edition,
Volume 10, p. 177.
47
Ode to the Four Letter Words
Banish the use of the four letter words
Whose meanings are never obscure.
The Anglos and Saxons, those bawdy old birds,
Were vulgar obscene and impure.
But cherish the use of the weak-kneed phrase,
That never quite says what you mean;
You'd better be known for your hyprocrite ways
Than as vulgar, impure, or obscene
When nature is calling, plain speaking is out.
When ladies, God bless 'em, are milling about,
You may wee-wee, make water, or empty the glass;
You can powder your nose, even 'Johnnie' may pass,
Shake the dew off the lily, see the man 'bout' the dog,
Or when everyone's soused its "condensing the fog."
But be pleased to remember if you would know bliss
That only in Shakespeare do characters----------.
When your dinners are hearty with onion and beans,
With garlic and claret and bacon and greens;
Your bowels get busy distilling a gas,
That Nature insists be permitted to pass.
Yojn are very polite, and try to exhale,
Without noise or odor (you frequently fail);
Expecting a zephyr, you usually start,
For even a deafer would call it a - - - - .
You may speak of a "movement" or sit on a seat,
Have a passage, or stool--- or simply excrete,
Or say to the others, "I'm going out back"
And groan in pure joy in that smelly old shack
You can go "lay a cable", or do "number two"
Or sit on the toidey and make a "do—do",
But ladies and men who are socially fit
Under no provocation will go take a----------.
48
A woman has bosoms, a bust, or a breast,
Those lily-white swellings that bulge 'neath her vest.
They are towers of ivory, sheaves of new wheat;
In a moment of passion, ripe apples to eat.
You may speak of her nipples as small - rings, of fire,
With hardly a question of raising her ire,
But by Rabelais' beard will she throw fits
If you speak of them roundly as good honest----------.
It's a cavern of joy, you are thinking of now,
A warm, tender field just waiting the plow.
Its a quivering pigeon, caressing your hand,
Or the National Anthem that makes us all stand.
Or perhaps its a flower, a grotto, a well,
The hope of the World, or a velvety hell,
But friend heed this warning, beware the affront
Of aping a Saxon don't call it a----------.
Tho' a lady repel your advance, she'll be kind
Just as long as you - intimate -. what's on your mind.
You may tell her you're hungry, you need to be swung,
You may ask her to see how your etchings are hung.
You may mention the ashes that need to be hauled;
Put the lid on her sauce-pan-------('lay' isn't too bald)
But the moment you're forthright, get ready to duck
The girl isn't born yet who'll stand for "Lets----------."
So banish the words that Elizabeth used,
When she was a Queen on her throne.
The modern maid's virtue is easily bruised
By the four letter words when used all alone.
Let your morals be loose as an alderman's vest
As long as the language you use is obscure
Today not the ACT, but the WORD is the test
Of the vulgar, the obscene, the impure.(l)
(I) One scholar has pointed out that there are nearly two dozen four letter
words instead of the six given here. This poem is in the vein of Eugene
Field's "The Fair Limousin" which is one of the well-known sources of synonyms
for intercourse.
49
We can only agree with Talleyrand who said that
speech was not given to people to express their thoughts
but to disguise them. There is little disguise in the forth-
right garb of limerology, however, due largely to the pop-
ular use of four letter words and the fact that the spoken
poetry of the people has survived without being abused by
a ridiculous unsemantic sense of false propriety.
A limerick almost always has some real substance to
it if it is a living verse. If a limerick is light nonsense, if it
has frothy filler lines, it floats upwards and soon disap-
pears in polite society. Once a limerick leaves the tongue
of the average man it becomes ephemeral, even though it
be recorded in books like - The Complete Limerick Book -
or - What Cheer. -
There are many facile limerick makers who are on the
lookout for new topics: political, mocking, critical, or
madcap. If they are merely ingenious, their verses may
die. If they have a fundamental musical sense, there are
good chances that their rimes may float downward to the
people and there be impregnated with real life; but only
rarely do any wholly conscious products catch permant-
ly on the popular tongue. The crop of verses about a recent
president and his wife, for example, are now almost all
forgotten. Usually limericks root in the larger vices (larger
than politics that is) so their etiology is a matter of some
ethnological importance. There are countless people for
example, who live in ties which afford them meagre sexual
satisfaction. The limerick offers such persons opportunity
to pull off these shackles and to express an infinity of
erotic desires. That is one reason why limericks are so
ubiquitous and vigorous. They are a substitute for the
unfulfilled desires of great numbers of our people who can-
not afford wild compensatory weekends in out-of-town
hotels.
On the fringes of limerology are a host of folk verses
which never took the stricter form, although they had
both the lyrical content and quality of thought. Such
doggerel quatrains might include:
50
If I had a girl and she was mine
I'd paint her tits with iodine.
And on her belly I'd paint a sign
Keep off the grass, this ass is mine.
Or
vel The rich man uses vaseline
1*° The poor man uses lard,
pu The nigger uses axle grease
in But he gets it twice as hard.
sp And
If the skirts get any shorter
' Said the flapper with a sob;
I'll have two more cheeks to powder
And a lot more hair to bob, (1)
Such verses are a cruder emanation of folk poetry than the
form we are concerned with, but have a definite poetic
kinship with it. Some toasts also show a leaningjto this
verse form, but the limerick does not seem to be at all
suited to toast giving. Nor to the best of my knowledge
has the limerick ever been turned into Valentine verse,
since its requirements are moreSformal than the quatrain.
Arnold Bennett, a great limerologist, once wrote George
Bernard Shaw (who held the form in rather low repute)
that the best limericks were unprintable. That has been
r the trouble with all comments on the limerick up to date:
1 the topics have all been considered unsuited to be (set
I down as a tribute to the vigor of the average man. They
t say "There was a young plumber from Leigh" is a very fine
i verse, but we can't tell you how it goes! (2)
] Someday when there is a great revival of international
1 sanity, and an end comes to our manifold repressions and
our compensatory wars, when there is a new renaissance
and a rebirth of man's tolerance, a book like this one may
be freely circulated. In a healthy and normal world, the
(!) From—My Life—Volume II by Frank Harris,, p. 430. He says in intro-
ducing the rime "The other day, here in Nice, I heard a delightful limerick."
(Sic)
(2) In—The Complete Limerick Book—this line is given to indicate Arnold
Bennett's favorite verse. Is such a book in any sense—complete?—
51
limerick would probably receive far less attention than it
gets now when sterile and emotionally impotent crusaders
are appointing themselves to persuade other people to
their own unhappy state. One cannot shut out the world.
As we realize where our new frontiers are, the vigour
of the pioneer will return to our lives. The effect of Vic-
torian prudery, of unfortunate bowdlerizings and the
consequent human stupidity, of the cruel sadistic tortures
of Catholic Inquisitions and Puritanical mores, must in
time all give way to a universal broadmindedness based
on knowledge, semantics, and moral and religious toler-
ance. Then the limerick as it lives among the people will
no longer be considered coarse, degenerate, and porno-
graphic, but a symbol of vigour, of reality, and of an
earthly humor. You cannot seduce or degrade a wise man.
To some extent it has been the artificial industrializa-
tion of our society and the socialization of our culture
which has imparted to many limericks neurotic and per-
verted undertones, and even a hint of foulness here and
there. Such things were not present in the minds either of
the unknown poet, or the numerous people who fortunate-
ly keep the rimes alive. A manure pile is a lot more healthy
sociological and biological manifestation than a whore
waiting for a pickup at a bar. The limerick is a robust
soul of a febrile literature about which our times tend to
construct an unhealthy body.
It is far better to face the cultural implications - broad
beyond the comprehension of the effete tho' they be - it is
far better to face than to ignore or suppress the human
forces which produce and nourish such a universal poetry
as is recorded here. Suppression always leads to revolutions
of one kind or another. Suppression is the mere forced
growing of scar tissue which covers over but never heals,
which only hides a diseased condition. Suppression is the
postponement of issues with which one admittedly has not
the maturity, tolerance or understanding to deal effective-
ly. Repressed ideas always continue to bother the uncon-
scious or subconscious mind, as each swing of the pendu-
lum toward prudery proves.
52
True pornography is not in the bald expression of fact
as found in the following limericks, but in the glint of
perversion, the hint of sex, and the travesty of hidden
human instincts in so-called respectable literature, as
Burton said. In the limerick, the reader is never called
ve upon to imagine vaguely hinted things. The limerick speaks
y out plainly, and being born of the people and nurtured by
them, it cannot possibly7 corrupt or corrode. And yet there
P* are novels which become best-sellers because they have
in one dirty word in them or a lewd dust cover.
SP The definitive work on the limerick will probably never
w' be written. People everywhere are constantly creating this
kind of poetry.(l) It rolls from tongue to tongue across
the land, across the barriers of morality, of postal rules,
and hypocritical religious protestations.
It will always be a fruitful field for human research.
Time is bound to see many choice specimens added to
this collection. And many of contemporary reference or
partial polish must be dropped from the ultimate record.
It is hoped however, that at least a few of these will be
chosen by the dispassionate scholars of the atomic age
when they delve into the jumbled record of our not-so-
moral past to write the - true - history of'our society.
^ (I) One eminent wit, tiring of the narrow or strict limerick
form, offers the
I following:
t Bridget O'Flaherty McHugh
n Held venal traffic with a gnu.
. Mistaking fore for aft one morn
. Impaled herself upon its horn.
Moral: those who seek high ends
1 Should shun our furred and feathered friends.
< And—
j Cedric TiUinghast O'Brien
Tried to masturbate a lion.
Playing with its lordly jock
He was ripped from nape to nock
Moral: those who play with Leo,
Gloria in excelsis Deoi
53
A
ABERYSTWITH
There was a young couple from Abersquith
Who put together the things that they kissed with.
As the evening grew older
They became somewhat bolder
And theyput together the things that theypissed with.
Norman Douglas in his introduction to - Some Limericks -
gives us an alternate version of the first two lines:
There was a young girl of Aberystwith
Who went to the mill they grind grist with ....
And there is the final Ipswith version:
There was a young lady of Ipswith
Took grain to the mill to get grist with;
But the miller's son Jack
Laid her down on her back,
And united the things that they pissed with.
That the limerick is genuine there can be little doubt be-
cause of the persistence of the musical rime - issed with -
in the various versions. But it does indeed belong to the
Silver Age, for the rime is forced and ingenious.
The false version goes:
There was a young lady of Aberystwith
Took grain to the mill to get grist with.
The miller's son Jack
With a pat on her back
Pressed his own to the lips that she kissed with.
ADAM
In the garden of Eden lay Adam
Complacently stroking his madam.
He chuckled with mirth,'
For he knew that on earth
There were only two balls — and he had 'em!
54
vei
Ho
Vv
in
sp
ws
Bi
ALASKA
There was a young girl from Alaska
Who'd screw whenever you'd ask her.
But soon she grew nice,
And up went her price
And no one would touch her but Astor!
As an example of just how distorted a rime can become
there is given:
There was a young girl from Lancaster
Who'd do anything anyone asked her.
But when she got spliced
She got so high priced
Only Jesus H. Christ, and John Jacob Astor.
ALGIERS (Bey of)
Then up spake the Bey of Algiers:
"I am old and well striken in years,
And my language is blunt;
But a cunt — is — a cunt,
And fucking —is— fucking" — (loud cheers).
Norman Douglas attributes this limerick to a trilogy,
whose other verses, he says are:
Thus spake — I am that I am — :
"For the Virgin I don't give a damn.
What pleases me most,
Is to buggar the Ghost,
And then to be sucked off by the Lamb."
And:
Thus spake the King of Siam:
"For women I don't care a damn.
But a fat-bottomed boy
Is my pride and my joy —
They call me a buggarer: I am!"
The authorship of the - I am - verse he says has been
claimed by no less than eleven Bishops, and five minor
Canons of the Church of England, whose names he does
not print, nor does he undertake the invidious task of decid -
ingfbetween various claimants. He continues by presenting:
55
V
Then up spake the young King of Spain:
"To fuck and to buggar is pain.
But it's not — infra dig —
On occasion to frig
And I do it again and again."
The kinship of these verses is obviously due to their "up
spake" first lines, altho the thread of buggary runs thru
them all. The least genuine of the four seem to be the
Algiers and the Spain verses because of the forced poetry
and esoteric versification.
The Siam verse has a first cousin in:
I am the King of Siam
For women I don't give a damn.
You may think it odd of me
But I prefer sodomy
What a hell of a buggarer I am!
An alternate exists for the last line as follows, the joyful
assertion:
*
For I am a buggarer, — I am —!
Having detoured to Siam, we have now to return to Algiers
for a final variant:
There was an Emir of Algiers
Who said to his harem, "My dears,
You may think it odd of me
But I'm giving up sodomy
Tonight there'll be fucking" (Loud Cheers).
And now that things are normal again, here is a childish
tid bit:
A princess who ruled in Algiers
Had bushels of dirt in her ears.
The tail of her shirty
Was also quite dirty
She never had washed it in years.
And|Siam has its childish counterpart too:
There was a girl of Siam
Who said to her lover, Kiam,
"If you kiss me of course
You'll have to use force
But God knows you're stronger than I am!
56
Which was recorded in an American variant in - Immor-
talia - :
A coon was out with his Liz
Said, "Baby let's get down to biz."
Said she, "That cain't be
Less you're stronger'n me,
But, honey, ah reckon you is!"
ALICE
There was a young lady named Alice
Who pee'd in the Archbishop's chalice.
Twas not for relief
To the best of belief,
But purely from sectarian malice.
Anjjalternative last line:
But just from sectarian malice.
But Alice persisted in her experiments, and carried one a
little too far:
There was an Oregon girl named Alice
Who used TNT for a phallus.
They found her vagina
In North Carolina,
And picked up her rectum in Dallas.
An excellent alternative line, but a very educated one goes:
i Nymphoniacal Alice, etc.
The atomic age rears its head in this same explosive con-
nection:
There was a young fellow named Bill
Who took an atomic pill.
His naval corroded
His asshole exploded
And they found his nuts in Brazil.
This general problem of the handling of explosives by im-
mature [hands was investigated as early as 1872 by A. C.
Hilton in this verse:
There was a young genius of Queens
Who was fond of explosive machines.
57
He once blew up a door
But he'll do it no more,
For it chanced that the door was the Dean's.(1)
After mature deliberation I have decided to include a var-
iant of the first Alice verse to avoid giving offence to anyone:
There was a young lady named Alice
Who pissed in the Archbishop's chalice.
To the best of belief
'Twas done for relief,
And — not — from sectarian malice.
AMOEBA (Var. Young Nazi)
There was a young Nazi amoeba
Who loved a Jewess named Reba
This primeval jelly
Would crawl up her belly
And gently whisper, 'Teh liebe."
This is an example of an obviously recent limerick. It is
smooth - it probably came from the pen of a smart Jewish
student, possibly at Columbia. It has the touch of a med-
ical student. I rather attribute it to a Jewish source, for
the jews are just sly enough to poke fun at their own
misery. In the same vein:
There's a notable family named Stein,
There's Gertrude, there's Ep, and there's Ein.
Gert's prose is the bunk
Ep's sculpture is junk
And no one can understand Ein!
ANHEUSER (Draft)
There was a young girl named Anheuser
Who said that no man could surprise her
But Pabst took a chance
Found the Schlitz in her pants
And now she is sadder Budweiser.
(I) The Cult of the Limerick, Cornhill Magazine, London, 1918; Volume 44.
58
ARDEN
There was a young fellow named Arden
Who was sucked off by his girl in a garden;
Said he, with a squirm,
"What's become of the sperm?"
Said she (ulp) "Beg pardon?"
Obviously the last line requires the narrator to pantomime
a gulp. A variant goes:
There was a young girl named Arden
Who was blowing her beau in the garden.
When he asked with a squirm,
„ "What's become of the sperm?"
She replied (ulp) "Beg pardon?"
ASIA
There was a young man from Asia*
Who notched his cock with a razor.
He made it so rough
He scuffed the tough muff
Of Brenda Diana Duff Frasier.
AUSTRALIA
j There was a young man from Australia
] Who painted his bum like a dahlia.
The drawing was fine
The colour divine
The sceht — ah that was a failure.
AZORES
There was a young girl from Azores
Whose ass was all covered with sores.
When she walked down the street
Dogs licked at the meat
Which hung in festoons from her drawers.
59
B
BANKER
There was a young fellow — a banker
Had bubo, itch, pox, and chancre,
He got all the four
From a dirty old whore
So he wrote a letter to thank her!
This verse is probably genuine, but shows a master's touch
in having an iambic and anapest foot in the third line by
the insertion of the word "the" before four. An inexper-
ienced hand would have said crudely:
He got all lour
From a dirty old whore
In crude pure iambic.
If you wrant to tantalize in mixed company there is this:
There was a young lady named Banker
Who slept while her ship lay at anchor.
She awoke in dismay
When she heard tM mate say
"Hi, Hoist up the top-sheet, and spanker!"
BATES
There was a young sailor named Bates
Who trod on the deck with his mates.
He fell on his cutlass
Which rendered him nutless
And practically worthless on dates.
BARODA
There was a young girl of Baroda
Who built a new kind of pagoda.
The walls of its halls
Were hung with the balls
And the tools of the fools who bestrode her.
60
BAYRUITH
There was a young man from Bayruith
Who was troubled with warts on his root;
With caustic he cut these,
And now when he peepees
He fingers his root like a flute.
BEECHER
The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
Called a hen a most elegant creature;
The hen, pleased with ihat
Laid an egg in his hat
And thus did the hen reward Beecher.
This witticism is attributed to - Oliver Wendell Holmes -
and it is fortunate we can adduce a more sensible version
to redeem the old fellow's perception and to merit record-
ing it here:
The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
Called a girl a most elegant creature;
So she laid on her back
And exposing her crack
Said, "Fuck -that- you old Sunday School Teacher!"
BELGRAVIA
There was a young man of Belgravia
Who cared neither for God nor his Saviour.
He walked down the Strand
With his balls in his hand,
And was had up for indecent behaviour.
The persistence of this fundamental pattern - a search by
the unknown poet for a rime With saviour - shows how
strong a tendency exists among the people to parody relig-
ious topics. A variant of the above follows:
There was a young man from Belgravia
Who thought that he was the Saviour.
He went down the Strand
With his cock in his hand,
And was nabbed for indecent behaviour.
61
BENGAL
There was a young man of Bengal
Who went to a fancy dress ball;
Just for a whim
He dressed up as a quim
And was had by the dog in the hall.
This stems of course from the story of the man who
went to a masquerade quite naked except for a ribbon a-
round one testicle. When asked what he represented he
said, "A fancy dress ball!" This is one of a series of such -
the man who came to a masquerade with his penis in a
milk bottle. When asked what he represented he said "A
fire alarm system-break the glass, pull twice, and I come."
Or the party where the guests had to arrive dressed
as songs, or song titles. A man arrived clad in a grass skirt
and glimpsed a nude girl inside the ballroom. The door-
keeper asked what song title he represented, and the man
replied, " I was called /Turkey in the straw,' but now I'll
have to change it to 'Coming through the Rye'!" But this
is off the track from Bengal. There are two more variants:
There was a young man of Bengal
Who swore he only had one ball.
Then two little bitches
They pulled down his breeches
And found he had none at all.
Only a few words are changed in this one:
There was a young man of Bengal
Who swore he had only one ball;
Then two sons of bitches
Took down his britches
And found he had no balls at all.
This last is important because it obviously echoes the folk-
song which goes "I've married a man who has no balls at
all -what! No balls at all, Yes! No balls at all - a very
small pecker and no balls at all!"
The inane version:
There was a young man of Bengal
Who went to a fancy dress ball.
62
vc
li
p
ii
si
W
B
Just for the fun
He dressed as a bun
And a dog ate him up in the hall.
Anon would never make an error like that in a dog's diet.
The people catch and correct things like ascribing a bread
diet to a dog. This last is obviously the printed version, as
is this variant from p. 88 of - A Lyttel Book of Nonsense: -
There was a young man of Southall
Who went to a fancy dress ball,
Information we lack
As to how he got back
Or whether he got back at all!
BERMUDA
There was a nude lewd from Bermuda
Who was shrewd but I proved to be shrewder.
She said it is lewd
To be screwed in the nude,
But I grew lewder, and shrewder, and screwed her.
BIRMINGHAM
There were two young ladies of Birmingham
And this is the story concerning them:
They lifted the frock
And tickled the cock
Of the Bishop as he was confirming 'em.
But this Bishop was nobody's fool
He was reared in a large public school:
He took down his britches
And fucked the two bitches
With his twelve inch Episcopal tool.
This is perhaps the finest extant example of a coupled lim-
erick. As to the lasciviousness of the priesthood, I need
not comment, for from time immemorial this has been a
source of much amusement. The countless stories about
preachers must have some bearing in fact. (1)
(I) Sec the numerous but now suppressed works reviewed in—The Erotic His-
tory of France—by Henry L Marchand, New York, Privately Printed, The Pan-
urge Press, 1933 (lOOOcc), 28$ p. Without the church to offset it, France would
have a dull erotic history indeed.
63
I have a slight variant to present:
There were three old ladies from Birmingham
Have you heard of the scandal concerning 'em?
How they lifted the frock
And played with the cock
Of the Bishop as he was confirming 'em?
The Bishop himself was no fool
He had been to a good public school.
He took down his britches
And fucked the two bitches
With his nine inch Episcopal tool.
I regret to record a sadistic variant:
There were two young ladies of Birmingham
I know of a scandal concerning 'em.
They stuck needles and pins
In the right reverend shins
Of the Bishop engaged in confirming 'em.
This whole business shows you what some people must
think about in Church.
BOMBAY
There was a young man from Bombay
Who was clever in a crude sort of way,
An ignorant bugger
The mate of a lugger
Who thought you spelled cunt with a "K."
Here we see a rough hewn limerick. Witness the striving
toward metrical and ideological perfection in this variant;
There was a young girl from Bombay
Who was screwed in a rough-handed way
By the mate of a lugger
An ignorant bugger,
Who always spelled cunt with a "K."
Bombay was also the source of devices for self-amusement
as the following two verses prove:
There was an old man from Bombay
Who fashioned a cunt out of clay.
Both concave and convex
To fit either sex
It soon rubbed all his foreskin away.
And:
There was a young man from Bombay
Who molded a cunt out of clay.
ve But the heat of his prick
lie Turned the clay into brick
pi And he wore all his foreskin away.
in A more mechanistic approach is found under Racine, and
sj thither you are referred; and a geographical variation of
w items 1 and 2 goes:
„ There was a young girl from Le Hay
Who was put in a family way
By the mate of a lugger
An ignorant bugger
Who always spelled cunt with a "K."
BOSTON
There was a young lad from near Boston
Who bought a shiny new Austin.
It would hold his ass
And a gallon of gas
But his balls hung out, and he lost 'em.
Another Boston limerick, of a piece with most of the inan-
ities which I have omitted runs something like this:
There was a young fellow from Boston
Whose right lung, alas, was a lost *un.
But in Denver's pure air
He now has a pair,
That's the difference between Denver and Boston.
BRAY
An indolent vicar of Bray
His roses allowed to decay.
His wife more alert
Bought a powerful squirt
And said to her spouse, "Let us spray."
65
This is attributed to Langford Reed by Louis Untermeyer,
who says that the compiler of - The Complete Limerick
Book - favors puns. The "Let us spray" business also harks
back to the story of the religious skunks in China, who
said that when they saw a missionary.
Fortunately there is a variant which, tho' I do not find it
in my notes, I believe goes something like this:
An indolent vicar of Bray
Neglected his fucking to pray
So his wife, more alert
Bought a powerful squirt,
And diddled herself with the spray.
There is also a variant of the spelling lesson considered
under Bombay:
There was a gay countess of Bray
And you may think it odd when I say
That in spite of high station,
Rank and education,
She always spelled Cunt with a "K."
BREEZE
There was a young fellow named Breeze
Who said to his girl, "Dear please,
It would give me much bliss
If you'd take hold of this,
And pay less attention to these!"
BRENT
There was a young lady of Brent
When her old man's pecker it bent
Said she with a sigh,
"O, why must it die?
Let's fill it with Portland Cement!"
This verse of course smacks of the immortal Kent (Q.V.)»
66
BREST
There was an old fellow of Brest
Who sucked off his wife with a zest,
Despite her great yowls
He sucked out her bowels
__- And spat them all over her chest.
jjc Norman Douglas' comment: "I have been assured that
this exquisite lyric is by Tennyspn; that he wrote numbers
. of such, and that nearly all were destroyed after his death.
111 In point of finish and good taste it is quite worthy of him,
SI and that he should have indulged his genius with this
w class of poetry does not strike me as unlikely. Whoever
B perpetuates solemti rubbish like the -Idylls- must feel the
need of unburdening himself from time to time, especially
when gifted with his powers of versification. Indeed, I
should say that whoever lives Tennyson's life must write
an occasional limerick or burst; and it would not surprise
me to learn when the real truth about him is published,
that he died 'with a limerick on his lips'."
Douglas also says this sucking business is a French prac-
tice tho' not confined to France, and that he was glad the
lady was the old fellow's wife. However, the people have
a response, for we record:
There was a young Frenchman from Brest
Who sucked off young girls with great zest.
In spite of their howls
He would suck out their bowels
And spit all the shit on their breast.
This identifies the man as a Frenchman - a thing good to
know. But the last line is suspect - the people seldom
make an error like saying " their breast," tho' the first
part of the line is perfectly admissable in the folk limerick.
BRIENZ
There was an old man of Brienz
The length of whose cock was immense:
With one swerve he could plug
A boy's bottom in Zug,
And a kitchen-maid's cunt in Goblenz.
67
Douglas says it is .58 kilometres from Brienz to Zug, and
says that the Swiss by actual measurement are not fav-
oured in respect to penis length.(l) Some races do have
unusually long implements, so long that queer copulatory
methods are required which many Christian missionaires
have reported in great detail, seeming to take a keen inter-
est in such matters. Whatever the case, this is the work of
an outlander - for plug does not rime with Zug, at least
except for the poetic purpose here intended.
BRYDE
There was a fat lady of Bryde
Whose shoestrings once came untied.
She didn't dare stoop
For fear she would poop,
And so she cried, and cried, and cried.
Sometimes:
There was a fat lady of Clyde.
And also, because of the fine B B lines:
There was an old lady named Bryde
Who ate a green apple and died.
The apple fermented
Inside the lamented
And made cider inside her inside.
(I) Penis Measurements in the Alps—G. Wcstlake, F. R. S. London, 1889.
68
BRIGHTON
There was a young man from Brighton
Who thought he'd at last found a tight 'un.
He said, "O my love,
It fits like a glove."
Said she, "You're not in the right 'un."
There is a pathetic undertone to this verse which quite
glosses over the sodomy involved.
BUCKINGHAM
There was a young curate from Buckingham
Wrote a pamphlet on women and fucking 'em.
But a clever young Turk
Eclipsed this great work
With a volume on assholes and sucking 'em.
There was a young curate of Buckingham
Who was blamed by the girls for not fucking 'em.
He said, "Though my cock
Is as hard as a rock,
Your cunts are too slack. Put a tuck in 'em."
A learned curate of Buckingham
Wrote a treatise on cunts and on fucking 'em.
But a learned Parsee
Taught him Gamahuchee,
So he added a chapter on sucking 'em.
69
c
CADITS
There was a young man from Cadits
Who planted an acre of tits.
They came up in the fall.
Red nipples and all,
And he carefully chewed them to bits.
I would prefer to.have th6 man come from "The Pits" if I
were writing this verse. Undoubtedly Cadits is a folk cor-
ruption of Cadiz.
CALCUTTA
There was a young man of Calcutta
Who tried to write CUNT on a shutter;
He got to CU
When a pious Hindu
Knocked him arse over tip in the gutter.
Norman Douglas says: "These venerable lines are of inter-
est to anthropologists; they emphasize a racial character-
istic which we Europeans would do well to bear in mind.
The Hindu did not behave in this brusque fashion because
he was "pious."- "Pious Hindu" is just a facon de parler -
but because sex to these people is too solemn a thing to be
joked about. Such is the Hindu's nature. His mind is a
cesspool; his erotic literature must be read to be believed;
but the idea of writing "cunt" on a shutter gives him the
creeps. They have forgotten how to laugh, these harassed
and withered races."
After the English took over India, no doubt the poor
Indians had little to laugh about. They are far too cult-
ured at an early age to endulge in the expressive pastime
of our own suppressed youths of writing dirty names every-
where. This verse describes a purely western trait imposed
on an Eastern people. I have always strongly suspected
70
thsKthe first line was wrong - that the young man was not
of, but merely in Calcutta, and was an Englishman at
that, behaving as people seem to feel they have a right to
do away from home, I doubt further if Indians stutter:
There was a young man of Calcutta
Who had an unfortunate stutter.
"I would like," he once said,
"Some b-b-b-bread,
And also some b-b-b-b-butter."
There are other stutterers, (M-m-m--m mother, d-d-d-
damn etc.) with which I won't bother you.
CAPE
There was an old man of the Cape
Who buggared a Barbary Ape.
Said the ape, "Sir, your prick
Is too long and too thick
And something is wrong with the shape."
Now what was wrong with the shape? A variant to the last
three lines tells us:
The ape said, "You fool!
You've got a square tool
You've buggared my ass out of shape."
But perhaps as Douglas says, the ape was exaggerating,
and it only - felt - square much as Socrates' prick felt
triangular to tender Alcibiades in Eugene Field's poem
"Socratic Love."
Robert Louis Stevenson used the word Cape in a limerick,
if you will endulge me a moment merely for the sake of
the record:
There was an old man of the Cape
Who made himself garments of crepe.
When asked, "Do they tear?"
He replied,"Here and there;
But they're perfectly splendid for shape."
71
CAPE COD
There was an old maid from Cape Cod
Who thought children an Act of God.
But it 'twarn't the Almighty
That raised up her nighty
'Twas Rodger the Lodger by God!
And
There was a young man of Cape Cod
Who once put his wife into pod.
His name? It was Tucker, ■♦
The dirty old fucker,
The bugger, the blighter, the sod!
We find Tucker recurring in feminine form:
There was a young lady named Tucker
Who rushed at her mother and struck her.
Her mother said, "Damn,
Don't you know who I am?
You act like a regular mucker!"
CARR
There was once a kiddie named Carr
Caught a man on top of his mar
As he saw him sticker
He said with a snicker,
"You do it much faster than par!"
GARY
There was a young jfellow named Cary
Who got fucking the Virgin Mary,
And Christ was so bored
At seeing ma whored
That he set himself up as a fairy.
Douglas says: "American; and it may be mentioned that
'fairy' is the American term for male prostitute. This poem
with its faulty metre and irreverential suggestions finds a
place here only because, under the guise of an allegory it
hints an important truth."
72
CASS
There was a young fellow named Cass
Who«£ balls were made out of brass.
In inclement weather
They rattled together
ve And the sparks flew out of his ass.
lie
in
si
w
B
Or:
There was a young fellow named Cass
Whose balls were made out of brass.
When they tinkled together
They played "Stormy Weather"
And the sparks flew out of his ass.
CAWNPORE
There were two young men of Cawnpore
Who buggared and fucked the same whore;
But the partition split
And the spunk and the shit
Rolled out in great lumps on the floor.
Douglas says: "Rather coarse, the last two lines; they have
a schoolboy flavor. The danger of this playful practice was
shown up some years ago in Tunis papers which reported
how two Arabs were sentenced in the local court for be-
having in a similar fashion to a young native girl.....
All the same it would have been wise if one or the other of
them had controlled his impatience and waited his turn.
And what was the lady doing, to allow this proceeding?
Being a prostitute, she ought to have known what she was
about. Such blame, therefore, as attaches to her should
not be withheld."
73
CHARTERIS
There was a young fellow named Gharteris
Put his hand where his young lady's garter is.
She said, *T don't mind,
Up higher you'll find
The place where my pisser and farter is."
This verse shows an ingenuity not typical of a people's
limerick. Futhermore there are very few girls as coopera-
tive as this. The idea of the farter - or its product the fart
is notorious for its stifling effect on romance. Jonathan
Swift in his "Strephon and Chloe" records as early as 1731:
"Now ponder well, ye parent dear
Forbid your daughters guzzling beer;
And make them every afternoon
Forbear their tea or drink it soon;
That, ere to bed they venture up,
They may discharge it every sup;
If not, they must in evil plight
Be often forced to rise at night.
Keep them to wholesome food confin'd,
Nor let them taste what causes wind:
'Tis this the ancient sage of Samos means,
Forbidding his disciples beans.
O think what evils must ensue;
Miss Moll the jade will burn it blue:
She cannot help it for her heart;
But out it flies, ev'n when she meets
Her bridegroom in the wedding-sheets.
Carminative and diuretic
Will damp all passion sympathetic:
And love such nicety requires
One blast will put out all his fires."
74
CHINA
There was a young lady from China
Who mistook for her mouth her vagina.
Her clitoris huge
She covered with rouge
^id lipsticked her labia minor.
This verse and the following one I know have not had a
long hale and hearty life in our 48 states. They are the
work of specialists. They also go to show that it is perfect-
ly possible to make up a limerick around any mellifluous
word:
There was a young girl from Medina
Who could completely control her vagina.
She could twist it around
Like the cunts that are found
In Japan, Manchuko and China.
These two verses are the only synthetic limericks in this
book. The others all come from the melting pot.
COAST
There was a young man from the coast
Who had an affair with a ghost.
In the midst of a spasm
This she ectoplasm
Said "Its wonderful, I can feel it—almost!"
I confess to an almost complete lack of knowledge of the
sensitivity of ghosts. What their tactile sensations are it
would be difficult if not impossible to say. This verse is
facile - almost professional. It is a newcomer to my notes.
A variant goes something like this:
There was a young man from the coast
Who had an affair with a ghost.
A terrible spasm
Passed over her chasm
While the fellow was browning his toast.
75
To brown toast is a colloquialism for buggarey or sodomy,
and it is not as erudite as one might think. The chocolate
speedway as this department is sometimes called is often
referred to as brown or brownie. To use the word - chasm-
to refer to the female pudenda, however, is poetic license.
COMO
There was an old buggar of Como
Who suddenly cried, "Ecce Homo!"
He tracked his man down
To the heart of the town
And gobbled him off in the duomo.
In Como, the duomo or Cathedral is described by Baedeker
as one of the finest in North Italy. I do not feel this is a
people's limerick, but an erudite one. The implication of
an educated slang in - Ecce Homo - behold—a homosex-
ual—depends together on the knowledge of Latin, and of
the slang homo as a colloquialism for homosexual. Gob-
bling is also fairly remote slang for going down on some-
body. Here the noun gobbler is in more common use than
the verb to gobble meaning to suck off. I think there is
small hope that the people will roll this along very far, at
least in this country.
76
CORFU
There was an old man of Corfu
Who fed upon cunt-juice and spew;
When he couldn't get this
He fed upon piss
And a bloody good substitute, too.
This piece has a coprophagous variant:
There was an old man of Corfu
Who fed upon cunt juice and spew;
When he couldn't get that
He ate what he shat
And bloody good shit he shat too!
There are several other such limericks dealing with the
eating of bodily excretions (see Wales and Dot). Edward
Lear spent some of the happiest years of his life in Corfu,
but did not verify this limerick for the record. No one
seems to know if Lear ever left any real limericks.
*
COSTANZA
There once was a maid of Costanza
Whose box was as big as a Bonanza.
It was nine inches deep,
And the sides were quite steep
And it had whiskers like General Carranza.
This is a forced piece from - Immortalia. - While I pre-
sent several limericks from this book, I cannot help but
have a feeling that they are usually of a poor quality. Some
seem hastily made - unpolished, forced, dirty or silly. The
limerick section of that work is far short of the rest of it.
CROFT
There was an old woman named Croft
Who amused herself in a loft.
She said, "A bologna
Is the real corona
Because it never gets soft."
Now you see what I mean about the limericks from - Im-
mortalia -? The Costanza and Croft verses are also found
in the little book - Ninety-Five Limericks. -
77
D
DAVE
There was an old man called Dave
Who kept a dead whore in a cave.
He said, "I'll admit
I'm a bit of a shit,
But think of the money I save!"
Or a variant for this miserable necrophile: *
There was a young man named Dave
Who screwed a dead whore in a cave.
When asked if ashamed
He said: "I can't be blamed,
Just think of the money I save!"
When I first learned that some people became undertakers
because of a fondness for caressing or having intercourse
with corpses, I was horrified, but only because my ig*
norance allowed me to be shocked. Yet after finding out
what one living human could do to another - and does do -
nothing anyone could make with a corpse seems the least
bit upsetting. A man who dropped a single bomb which
killed over a hundred thousand people was only concerned
about the newest funny papers afterwards. This fact
set opposite one man's perverted affection for a single
corpse interests me: I think of how shocked people would
be about the necrophile, how indifferent to the act of the
atom-bomber! I wonder just wherein we have really pro-
gressed from the Stone Age. The enormity of a crime seems
to bear no relation to its quality. Modern society seems to
me peculiarly distinguished by two things: first its curious
blind spots and second its virulent intolerance. They
would put poor Dave in jail instead of sending him to a
doctor.
78
DATCHET
V€
li<
>
ir
si
Vi
B
There was a young man of Datchet
Who cut off his prick with a hatchet
Then very politely
He sent it to Whitely
And ordered a cunt that would match it.
In the geography of the limerick world, the use of rare or
unknown place names is no crime. This verse seems ob-
viously English, and the young man was certainly lucky if
he was able to find a masochistic cunt.
DEAL
There was a faith healer of Deal
Who said "Although pain isn't real
If I sit on a pin
And it punctures the skin
I dislike what I — fancy — I feel."
This fellow had nothing on Mrs. Eddy. She made no bones
about what she disliked. Her religion was devoted primarily
to making herself comfortable, asDakin conclusively proves
in his suppressed life of this amazing business woman.(1)
Faith healing is an old business. Mrs. Eddy corrupted the
Quimby manuscripts(2) which .... but let us not go into
that fascinating matter here, for big fleas have little fleas
on their backs to bite 'em. And little fleas have littler fleas,
and so ad infinitum, as Swift said in approximately those
words.
DECATUR
There was an old man of Decatur
Who took out his red hot pertater.
He tried at her dent
But when his thing bent
He got down on his knees and he ate 'er.
(1) Edwin Franden Dakin—Mrs. Eddy—New York: Chas. Scribner's Sons,
1930 (563 pages).
(2) A. W. Dresser (ed.)—The Quimby Manuscript—New York: Thos. Y.
Crowell, 1921 (474 pages). My pencil is blunt from striking out page after
page of such commentary, notes, and references as these. The heart of the
student weeps!
79
DEE
There was a young woman from Dee
Who stayed with each man she did see.
When it came to a test
She wished to be best
And practice makes perfect, you see.
This is obviously an attempt to humanize this type of poem:
There was a young lady named Tess
Whose necking was rather a mess.
In less than a week
She acquired a technique
And now she's a social success.
DELRAY
There was a young Jew of Delray
Who buggared his father one day.
He said, "I like rather
To stuff it up Father;
He's clean and there's nothing to pay."
Norman Douglas says he finds sodomy quite as common
among jews as Christians. The Christians however endulge
from natural dispositions toward it, while the jews do it
because they consider it more hygienic and economical
than normal coition. The youth, he adds, is certainly
thrifty with strongly developed patriarchal instincts. He
finds a smack of incest in this verse but concludes: "Read-
ers of the Bible will not be surprised at such things." How-
ever the fact that always amazes me, is that they are not
only surprised at such things in life, but curiosly blind to
them in the Bible.
DETROIT
There was a young girl from Detroit
Who at fucking was very adroit.
She could squeeze her vagina
To a pin point and finer
Or open it out like a quoit.
80
DEVIZES
There was a young man of Devizes
Whose balls were of different sizes.
One was so small
vc It was nothing at all,
li< The other took numerous prizes.
P1 Perhaps this monorchous individual was a victim of ele-
ir phantiasis of the scrotum. One can see pictures in medical
sj books of enlarged testicles so vast they touch the ground,
w or must be wheeled in a barrow if the poor fellow is to
„ move at all.
There is a female version of this verse:
There was once a young girl of Devizes
Whose twat came in several sizes.
Once it was small
Of no use at all
But now it takes several prizes.
Presumably these prizes are for dimensions, not perfor-
mance.
A variant:
There was a young man from Devizes
* Whose ballocks were different sizes.
0 His prick when at ease
a Hung down to his knees
v Now what must it be when it rises!
This fellow has also come from Vinsizes, and yet our index
refers him to Devizes. There is a silly variant of this verse
using the poor fellow's ear. It makes it pure enough to get
into anthologies like - The Complete Limerick |Book -
and - What Cheer -, however.
DEVON
]i There was a young lady from Devon
Who was cruelly assaulted by seven
Young Catholic priests
^ The libidinous beasts,
For such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
81
The contemporary and ancient records are full of the con-
cupiscence of the priesthood. A limerick like this is often
parented by some incident, and kept alive in the folk poetry
while the facts are forgotten.(l)
DIRKIN
There fwas a young fellow named Dirkin
Who was always jerkin his gherkin.
His Mother said, "Dirkin,
Quit jerkin' your gherkin
Your gherkin's fer ferkin, not jerkin!"
Most motherly advice, though I am afraid many fellows
don't get this information in such fashion.
There is a variant which I have also indexed under Perkin
which belongs here:
A shy young fellow named Perkin
While furtively jerking his gherkin
By his wife was surprized
Who with tears in her eyes,
Said, "Perkin you're shirkin' your firkin!"
Confirmed masturbators do sometimes drift away from
their wives psychologists have recorded. A gherkin is a
fairly small species of pickle, and always gave these verses
a slightly sad or nostalgic ring to my ear.
DOT
There was a young maiden named Dot
Who lived upon oysters and snot.
When she couldn't get these
She lived upon cheese
Which she scraped from inside of her twat.
(I) Sec—The Devil in Robes, or The Sin of Priests—The Gory Hand of
Catholicism Stayed—St. Louis, Missouri: 'Columbia Book Concern, 1899 (472
pages). Here are some passionate facts. The Catholic Menace of the past
is nothing to what it is now, with the Pope apparently hoping to jockey us into
a Russian War so he can come out on top as Ruler of the World.
82
To end this whole vile business, I will record another such
perverse appetite here:
There was an old lady from Grott
Who lived on green apples and snot.
When she couldn't get these
She fed upon cheese
Which she scraped from the end of her twat.
The index must compensate for these displace^ verses. The
' common BB lines to all these variants show a kinship
1 which cannot be overlooked. The variants probably arose in
s transmission, and which was the original verse it is im-
^ possible to say. This business of cheese or duck butter as
] some people call it is primarily associated with the male
organ, and the people preserve this memento of that fact:
There was a young man from Marseilles
Who lived upon clap juice and snails.
When he grew tired of these
He would live on the cheese
Which he picked from his prick with his nails.
I guess this just about dispatches these ''filthy habits with
the hands," at least for the time being.
DULUTH
There once was a maid in Duluth
A striver and seeker of Truth;
This pretty wench
Was adept at French
But she said that all else was uncouth.
This is another - Immortalia - gem. At first it seems in-
nocuous enough, but it is a rather simple-minded thing.
Reference to the matter of 69 is seldom made by the race
name - to french is a verb, not a noun. That misuse of the
term gives an amateurish tone to this verse. The people
are amazingly familiar with synonyms for gobbling, and
have good words and expressions like kiss off, kneel at the
alter, muff diver, pearl diving, pussy bumping, sixty nine,
sixty three, lick box, etc., etc. which they use to describe
this perversion. This girl was adept at frenching, not
French, Anon!
83
DUNDEE
There was an old man of Dundee
Who came home as drunk as could be.
He wound up the clock
With the end of his cock
And buggared his wife with the key.
This Tristram Shandy clock winder has a variant for the
second line as follows:
"Who went on a hell of a spree."
And the same verse uses "diddled" instead of "buggared"
in the last line. Diddled is a fine word - has a delicacy
needed here and required for such key uses.
A dandy variant - scarcely related to the above:
There was a young priest from Dundee
Who went to the garden to pee;
When he couldn't make his piss come
He said, "Pax Vobiscum,
I must have G—L—A—P."
Delicate indeed of him to avoid offending the sensitive ear,
by spelling it out! I am reminded of Jonathan Swift's long
suppressed words on the same moist disease:
We hardly thunder twice a year;
The bolt discharg'd, the sky grows clear:
But every sublunary dowdy
The more she scolds, the more she's cloudy.
Some critics may object perhaps
That clouds are blamed for giving claps
But what alas are claps ethereal
Compar'd for mischief to venereal?
Perhaps the young priest from Dundee could say!
DUNN
A skinny old maid named Dunn
Wed a short-peckered son of a gun.
She said, "I don't care
If there isn't much there,
God knows it is better than none."
It probably wouldn't take as much to console an old maid
as a vigorous young bride. Or perhaps she didn't know one
thing from another.
84
EALING
There was a young lady of Ealing
Who had a peculiar feeling
She lay on her back,
And opened her crack
And pissed from the floor to the ceiling.
The young lady also comes from Wheeling, to wit:
There was a young lady of Wheeling
Said to her beau, 'Tve a feeling
My little brown jug
Has need of a plug."
And straightway she started in peeling.
You are indifferently referred to the following perfectly
inane variants on the Wheeling - Ealing business:
There was a young lady of Ealing
Who had a peculiar feeling
That she was a fly
And wanted to try
To walk upside down on the ceiling.
She was also
Devoid of all delicate feeling
When she read on the door
"Don't spit on the floor!"
She jumped up and spat on the ceiling.
Or:
There was an old spinster from Ealing
Who was endowed with such delicate feeling
That she thought that a chair
Should not have its legs bare
So kept her eyes fixed on the ceiling.
85
ECUADOR
There was 3 man from Ecuador
Who went to bed with a worn-out whore.
He got up in the dark
And was bieard to remark,
"I hired ^ twat, not a corridor!"
Perhaps the ni^n was at fault, for we find that:
There was a young man of Tagore
Who had just an inch and no more.
Twas all right for keyholes
And little girls' pee-holes,
But it wasn't so good for a whore.
It is hard to know just whose side to take in this relative
controversy. It obviously stems from stories like the one
about the man who wanted to compare the sublime
acquiesence of his wife with the wholehearted cooperation
of a whore. The man didn't do as well as he expected he
would. The whore said - "That's not a very good organ
you've got there." And he replied, "Well, it was not meant
to be played in a cathedral."
Another version goes:
There once was a man from Florida
Who liked his friend's wife so he borrowed her.
He cried in surprize
Spreading open her thighs,
"God, this ain't a twat — its a corridor!"
ENO
There was a young fellow named Eno
Who said to his girl, "Now old Beano,
Lift your skirt up in front
And enlarge your old cunt,
For the size of this organ is keeno!"
An - Immortalia - gem about a conceited man indeed.
The girl must have had a vagina like an accordian, or like
the girl's from Detroit, Q.V. Again I find the verse forced,
but dimly harking of a fine poem.
86
ESTER
There was a young lady named Ester
Who said to the man who undressed her,
"I think you will find
The best hole behind
v The front one's beginning to fester."
A sad state of affairs, certainly narrowing the choice.
The lady had another name:
There was a young lady named Hester
Who said to the man who undressed her,
"If you wouldn't mind
* Please enter behind
The front is beginning to fester."
Hester was more polite than Ester. It is amazing the way
stories of gut reamers get into limerology. The dirt road
however has a fascination for the people, and while I don't
particularly care for the topic, the people do, and it is con-
stantly recurring in their poetry.
The first line may also read:
There was a young lady from Chester.
EVA
There was a young lady named Eva
Filled up her bath-tub to receive her.
She took off her clothes
From her head to her toes
And a voice at the keyhole yelled "Beaver!"
This habit of small boys of yelling "Beaver" when they see
a main with a beard and the spitting on the tip of one fin-
ger is irrepressible. A more chaste young lady spent some
time in Hades for yelling Beaver when she saw St. Peter,
but that is so inane a business we can forego it here.
87
EXETER
There was a young lady from Exeter
Who made all the men crane their necks at her.
One was so brave
As to take out and wave
The foremost sign of his sex at her.
An exhibitionist, no doubt.
Or
Some who were brave
Would take out and wave
The distinguishing marks of their sex at her,
A curious cousin is found in the new pronunciation of
Exeter- "Ex-^eater."
There was an old maid from Exeter
Who dearly loved to nibble on peter.
She would often say, \
"I like it this way,
For I think its so very much neater."
88
FASHION
There was a young lady of fashion
Who had oodles and oodles of passion.
She smiled and said,
As she lept into bed,
"Here's one thing that Nelson can't ration!"
An obviously recent verse, and one that may soon be for-
gotten.
FLEA
A wonderful fish is the flea
He bores and he bites on me.
I would like indeed
To watch him feed
But he bites me where I can't see!
First of all, a flea is not a fish, and second, Jonathan Swift
has given us a better version of this insect problem than
lesser poets will ever be able to put to limerick, to wit:
The vermin only tease and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
FRANCE
There was an old lady from France
Who hopped on a train in a trance.
The engineer fucked her
So did the conductor
And the brakeman went off in his pants.
89
This can also happen on motor busses:
There was a young girl of Penzance
Who boarded a bus in a trance.
The passengers fucked her
Likewise the conductor,
The driver shot off in his pants.
If the lady was not in a trance she did better, to wit:
There was a young lady from Clyde
Who'd no ticket on which she could ride.
So she told the conductor
Who immediately fucked her
Ati|l gave her two dollars beside.
That about disposes of this business of coitus in transit.
It is as Norman Douglas said, a deplorable business from
beginning to end, especially for the driver.
TO "PUTTER"
When she wanted a new way to futter
He greased up her asshole with butter;
In went his jock
With a terribly sock,
And they carried her home on a shutter.
In the same vein is found:
There was a young man of Calcutta
Who thought he would do a smart trick;
So he anointed his asshole with butter,
And in it inserted his prick.
It was not for greed after gold;
It was not for thirst after pelf;
'Twas simply because he'd been told
To go home and buggar himself.
90
GLOUCESTER
There was an old lady of Gloucester
Met a passionate man who soon tossed her.
She wasn't much hurt
But it dirtied her skirt
So think of the anguish it cost her.
Those Gloucester girls are always in trouble:
There was a young girl from near Gloucester
Whose people once thought they had lost her
All they found in the grass
Was the mark of her ass
And the knees of the one who had crossed her.
GODITCH
There was an old man from Goditch
Had the gon, the syph and the itch;
His name was McNabs
He also had crabs
The dirty old son of a bitch!
Sometimes also Downditch.
GRANT
There was a young fellow named Grant
Who was made like the Sensitive Plant.
When asked, "Do you fuck?"
He replied, "No such luck
I would if I could, but I can't."
GRASTY
There was an old man named Grasty
Whose favorite sport was ass-ty
He'd buggar with joy
Any innocent boy
And thought that fornication was nasty.
"Grasty" is probably a forced rime called forth to com-
memorate in Limerick Form Eugene Field's longer poem
"Socratic Love." The first two lines of the second verse go:
91
"Now wit ye well that in those parts twas not con-
sidered nasty
For sage philosophers to turn their tools to
pederasty."
Much as I would like I refrain from giving the whole poem
here, even though it is exquisitely thoro in its investigation
of Socrates' affection for Alcy. Ass-ty is plainly a coined
word.
GREECE
That naughty old Sappho of Greece
Said, what I prefer to a piece,
Is to have my pudenda
Rubbed hard by the enda
The little pink nose of my niece.
GREENWICH
There was an old man from Greenwich
Whose balls hung down like spinach;
His remarkable tool
He kept wound on a spool
And unrolled it inich by inich.
His diet is slightly broader in this variant:
There was on old man from Greenwich
Who lived upon cabbage and spinach;
He had such a tool
It was wound on a spool
Inich by inich by inich.
GROOM
These was a young fellow named Groom
Who went to a lesbian's room.
They argued all night
About who had the right
To do what, and with which, and to whom.
GROUCH
Winter is here with his Grouch
The time when you sneeze and slouch.
You can't take your women
Canoeing or swimming
But a lot can be done on a couch!
92
H
HALL
There was a young lady named Hall
Who went to a birth control ball.
She bought all the devices
At ridiculous prices
And nobody asked her at all.
^A certain amount of instruction is absolutely necessary to
the successful use of these devices.
A rather ingenious jingle of the nonsense kind also plays
with Hall:
There was a young fellow named Hall
Who fell in the spring in the fall.
'Twould have been a sad thing
If he'd died in the spring,
But he didn't — he died in the fall.
HAREM
A Sultan at odds with his harem
Thought of a way he could scare 'em.
He got him a mouse,
Set it loose in the house
Thus starting the first harem-scarem.
HORN
There was a young man of Cape Horn
Who wished he had never been born
And he wouldn't have been
If his father had seen
That the end of the rubber was torn..
A slight variant in lines 3 and 4 goes:
Nor would he have been
If his parents had seen.
93
Norman Douglas was somewhat concerned with how this
rubber got to Cape Horn. He gives some interesting bits on
the history of the condom to wit: 'These appliances are
supposed to be of French origin, but they must have been
already known at the Byzantine Court if what Gibson calls
'the most detestable precautions' of Theodora were of this
kind. And some curious material has now come to light
showing that they were in use under the Merowingians.
(Prof. O. Schwanzerl, - Kondonsgebrauch in Fruhesten
Mittelalter-, Budapest, 1903.) They were made of deerskin
(gegerbtes Hirshleder) and smeared with tallow (Unschluek)
to facilitate penetration. (For an analogous use of leather
see Mime VI and VII of Herodas.) The invention was at-
tributed to the Queen who, while fond of lovers, insisted,
and rightly, in the legitimacy of her offspring. The world
would be a better place if modern women had the same
respect for their husbands."
HOWELLS
The illustrious author Dean Howells
Had a terrible time with his bowels.
His wife, so they say,
Cleaned them out every day
With special elongated trowels.
HUB
There was a young lady of Hub
Who went with her beau to a pub,
But her mama spied her
To the bathroom she hied her
And oh how she made the girl scrub.
HUGHES
There was a young fellow named Hughes
Who swore off of all liquor and booze.
He said, "When I'm muddled
My senses get fuddled
And I pass up too many good screws."
As Shakespeare said, alcohol increases desire but seriously
impairs performance. We take this problem of Hughes' to
be a physical and not a social one.
94
IRAQ
There was a young man from Iraq
Who could play a bas& viol with his cock.
With sufficient erection
He could play a selection
v By Johnanes Sebastian Bach.
1 I want to warn the young man of the danger of rupture.
This has occurred not only from banging the organ against
a bedpost, but also from the less violent act of merely
bending the penis to get it inside the pants while erect.(l)
God knows what disaster would follow upon such an exer-
cise as playing Bach.
Compare the innocuous:
There was a young lady from Rio
Who played in a Beethoven Trio.
Her technique was scanty
So she played andante
Instead of allegro con brio.
IPSWICH
There was a young dancer from Ipswich
Who took most astonishing skips which
So delighted a miss
She said, "Give me a kiss!"
He replied, "On the cheeks or the lips which?"
This naivete is presented because it is so fraught with
interpretive possibilities, and because it may well stem
from the Ipswith and Aberystwith verses 0. V.
(I) Sexual Debility in Man—p. 242.
95
J
JOHNS
There was a young student of Johns
Who wanted to bugger the swans.
But the loyal hall porter
Said, 'Tray take my daughter
The birds are reserved for the Dons."
If this topic interests you, refer to Santander and Tou-
louse, where feathered buggarey is further investigated.
Sodomy with birds is frequently mentioned in medical
literature.(1)
JOSSYL
An Archeologist fellow named Jossyl
Once found an unusual fossil
He could tell by the bend
And the knob at the end
It was the peter of Paul the Apostle.
The sublime closing line of this verse makes up for the
sin of creating Jossyl. Great care was taken in mummifying
the sexual organ of Egyptian kings, but it is doubtful if any
fossilized sexual organs of the saints will ever be found.
Paul was especially depraved, and it is known he was a
castrate Probably the deformities of his sex organ dis-
cussed above had a great deal to do with his silly advice
about it not being good to touch a woman.
In this matter of the fossil penis, let us be specific. There
is very little chance of fossil flesh surviving. Even in well-
wrapped mummies the flesh largely dries up and it is seg-
mentally unrecognizable. Of King Tut we find when these
parts were exposed: *'There was no pubic hair visible, nor
(I) Sec for example—Sexual Debility in Man—p. 238. "A man ... caught
committing sodomy with a hen, excused his act on the grounds that his genitals
were so small as to preclude intercourse with women."
96
was it possible to say whether circumcision had been per-
formed, but the phallus had been drawn forward, wrapped
independently, and then retained in the ithyphallic posi-
tion by the perineal bandage."(1)
The chances are therefore if such a relic were preserved it
would be unrecognizable, altho it is not beyond the range
of possibilities that such a trophy exists. We read: "In the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Abbey Church of
Coulombs, Diocese Chartres, France, claimed to posses the
prepuce or foreskin of Jesus, which had been cut off when
he was circumcized, and it was believed that when a preg-
nant woman touched this relic she was assured of a safe
and easy confinement. Henry V of England borrowed this
relic in order that his wife Katherine might touch it, after
which he returned it to the Abbey."(2)
Wall elsewhere has this to say about the early Christians
which is still applicable: "The early Christians were a
socialistic society mostly made up from members of the
lower classes, slaves, laborers, etc.; necessarily they were
also more pr less ignorant, superstitious and credulous
enough to accept beliefs that could not appeal to the edu-
cated classes." And he goes on to talk of the credulity
needed to believe in the Virgin Birth.(3) I would add this
foreskin business, as well as the bubbling blood of Saint
Januarious which proved to be ox bile and Glauber's salts
to which the population of Naples genuflects even today .(4)
(1) The Tomb of Tut-ankh-amen—by Howard Carter, Volume II, New York:
Geo. H. Doran Company, 1927. Quotation from page 227.
(2) Sex and Sex Worship—p. 389.
(3) Ibid—p. 517.
(4) The Converted Catholic Magazine—"Fake Relics and Miracles" (October,
1945), p. 219.
97
K
KELLY
There was a young couple named Kelly
Who were forced to walk belly to belly
Because in their haste
They used library paste
For what they thought was vaginal jelly.
KENT
There was a young fellow from Kent
Whose dong was so long that it bent
To save himself trouble
He put it in double
And instead of coming he went.
This is one of the most f amous verses in our whole folk
history.
KENTUCKY
A girl who lived in Kentucky
Said, "Yes I've been awfully lucky!
No man ever yet
On my ass made me get
But sometimes I feel awfully fucky!"
A rather poor example of the limerick. I doubt the reality
of the colloquialism "to feel fucky." The true limerick
would not carry such a fake line as "On my ass made me
get." The people are invariably more forthright, and don't
stand for such puerile poetic devices in their dish.
KEW
There was a young lady of Kew
Who said as the Curate withdrew
I prefer the dear Vicar
He is longer and thicker
Besides he comes quicker than you.
98
Ith
|>u
A variant to the last line is more satisfactory to the young
lady:
And stronger and slicker than you.
The last line of the poem as given by Douglas I feel to be
an example of where the real line was forgotten by some
slack-minded troubadour, and he made up a substitute
which did not have the finish, the music, and the ordinary
common sense of the people's original line. Kew is not a
usual or familiar place name in this country, yet this has
not in any way hampered the travels of this conception
from coast to coast, from Hudson's Bay to the Gulf. Length
and strength, thickness and slickness are all desirable
properties, and it is only right that the vicar should out-
rank the curate.
KHIEF
There was an old Abbot of Khief
Who thought the Impenitent Thief
Had ballocks of brass
And an amethyst ass
And he died in this awful belief!
Or the Douglas variant to the last two lines:
And an ivory ass
A faith surpassing belief!
This is a scholar's handiwork. The word "impenitent" tells
us that. Futhermore, the mythologists have not been able
to do a great deal with the two thieves. The popular con-
ception of the crucification, the large cross, and two small
ones is rife with sexual implications (e. g. penis and two
testicles), and is one reason the legend persists. Gestas, the
thief on the left hand must have been the impenitent one.
Dimas, the one on the right was the one who rebuked
Gestas for complaining of his fate.(l) Whatever the case
this verse will live longer in the atmosphere of the good
church school than in that of the city street.
(I) See Nicodemus VII Verses 10-12. The Lost Books of the Bible—World
Syndicate Publishing Co., Cleveland and New York, 1926 (269 pages). This
interesting book shows what smart business men the churchmen were—they threw
out all the apocryphal material which didn't suit their legend.
99
KILDARE
There was a young man of Kildare
Who was having a girl on a chair
At the 63rd stroke
The furniture broke
And his rifle went off in the air,
A slight variation occurs:
There was a young man from Montclair
Who was screwing his girl on a chair.
At the 21st stroke
The little chair broke
And off went his gun in the air!
It is possible to document this position for intercourse
with some thoroughness. The position is illustrated in- The
Eternal Eve - and looks awkward at best.(l) It is listed as
positions No. 14 (face to face) and No 15 (rear) of the 24
positions given in - Technique of the Love Act - (2) with
this Note "In using positions 14 and 15 it is necessary to use
a very low chair so the wife can keep her feet upon the floor
without undue effort," In - The Horn Book - (3) the mat-
ter of riding a cock horse to Banbury Cross is thoroughly
covered in Article XXXVI. The Spikey Chair; Article XLII,
The Cock Horse Crossed Straight (requires a low bench)
(1) The Eternal Eve—lllus. opp. p. 94.
(2) Doctor Douglas MacDougaH—Technique ol the Love Act—'Privately
Printed for the physician's professional use, New York, 1937 (63 pages).
(3) The Horn Book—A girl's guide to the knowledge of good and evil.
Printed for The Erotica Biblion Society of London, 1899 (160 pages). ~
100
etc. etc. In the section of this remarkable book dealing
with "postures with introduction of the member" there
are listed 62 positions. The position is too erotic to be in-
cluded in Fritz Kahn's - Our Sex Life, - (1) however T. H
Van deVelde in his-Ideal Marriage - is more thorough and
does cover it under Section V, Sedentary Attitude, and Sec-
tion X, Posterior Sedentary Attitude.(2) It would be possible
to document this matter even further. We could go to the
Chinese Bridal Books for example or inquire why - The
Kama Sutra - rather cursorily deals with the sitting posi-
tion in Chapter VI "Of the Different Ways of Lying Down
and various Kinds of Congress," seeming to favor the stand-
ing or leaning position. But if a Hare man is trying to mate
with an elephant Woman in this position there is going
to be a shot taken in the air every time (3) even if the fur-
niture holds out.
There is a freak limerick on the chair, which would be
a fruitful source for a better verse, to wit:
A girl who weighed many an oz.
Used language I dare not pronoz.
For a fellow unkind
Pulled her chair out behind
Just to see (so he said) if she'd boz.
(Author's note: as I prune and edit this manuscript for
publication and delete comment after comment, I cannot
forebear including certain sections of the manuscript just
as I wrote it; as here.)
(1) Fritz Kahn—Our Sex Life—New York: A. A. Knopf, 1944 (459 pages).
(2) Th. H. Van de Velde, M.D., New York: Random House, 1926-30 (323
pages plus 8 plates).
(3) The Kama Sutra—classifies men as Hare, Bull and Horse, women as
Deer, Mare and Elephant, according to the siie of their sexual parts, and gives
instruction for adapting the organs if mismated (Chapter I &nd ff.). We
use the divorce courts because of cruel false modesty about such basic and
personal problems.
101
KILKENNY
There was an old girl from Kilkenny
Whose usual charge was a penny;
For the half of that sum
You might roger her bum
A source of amusement to many.
KINGS
There was a young fellow from Kings
Who'd no use for whores or such things.
But his highest desire
Was a boy in the choir
Whose ass was like jelly on springs.
Or:
There was a young parson from Kings
Whose mind was on heavenly things.
But his heart was afire
For a lad in the choir
Whose ass was like jelly on springs.
These are both prime examples of basic limerology. We all
know what English schools are famous for.
KLEPPER
There was a young maiden of Klepper
Who went out one night with a stepper.
And now in dismay
She murmurs each day
"His pee-pee was made of red-pepper I"
102
L
LAPLAND
An innocent boy in Lapland
Was told that fucking was grand.
But at his first trial
He said with a smile
"I've had the same feeling by hand."
LAY (VERB)
There was a young woman who lay
With her legs wide apart in the hay.
Then calling a ploughman,
She said, "Do it now man!
Don't wait till your hair has turned gray!"
Note the first line ending not only in a verb, but in an
incomplete sentence, both comparatively unusual.
LEE
I dined with the Duchess of Lee
Who asked, "Do you fart when you pee?"
I replied with some wit,
"Do you belch when you shit?"
And felt it was one up with me.
A noble verse, and worthy of old England in its lack of
polysyllables. It is sometimes started with the line:
"O I went to the Duchess' for tea."
There is a variant and no doubt it comes from Ben Jon-
son's pungent line: "She has a privy fault, she farts in her
sleep."
There was a young lady named Skinner
Who dreamt that her lover was in her.
She woke with a start
And let a loud fart
Which was followed by luncheon and dinner.
103
(Under Skinner you will find more of this dinner in her
business.)
In the remarkable book - An Essay on Wind - (1) you will
find the following good advice to substantiate this business
of a social fart, on page 35:
"A celebrated French physician in a work lately printed
entitled 'La Methode pour conserver La Sante' hath
the following remarkable passage: - No person can be
in health without farting - it is necessary for the pres-
ervation of health and spirits - it excites digestions and
animates wit. What a pity such a custom should be
banished from polite society."
A very amusing incident is related on pages 26 and 27 of
this same book. "The extraordinary Italian farter, Signor
Trebello had an amazing and incredible talent of convey-
ing the sound of his farts to any person in the same room,
and could, wonderful to relate! make it sound as if it came
out of a pocket, or the mouth or the ear. This man was
afterwards imprisoned for life for making the Grand Duch-
ess of Tuscany fart several times, - mal a propos, - at a
levee, whilst she was in grave conversation with some of
her nobles. This was undoubtedly a very dangerous talent
as it made a lady fart by proxy. These farts may be called
the - wonderful - or the - proxy farts -." There are other
kinds described which I consider equally wonderful how-
ever, altho here we are concerned primarily with the social
aspects of the subject.
The whole question was thoroughly reviewed by Ben
Franklin; his objective was, and I quote:
"To discover some Drug wholesome and not disagree-
able to be mixed with some common food, or sauces,
that shall render the natural discharges of Wind from
our Bodies not only inoffensive, but agreeable as per-
fumes."^)
(1) An Essay on Wind—humbly dedicated-to a late Lord Chancellor. No
date. No publisher. No author. (109 pages)
(2) From an untitled, unpaged, undated book called—Facetiae Frankliana.
104
LEEDS
There was a young fellow from Leeds
Who ate a packet of seeds.
Long blades of grass
Grew out of his ass
\ And his balls were all covered with weeds.
1 Or:
* There was a young seedsman from Leeds
. Who rashly swallowed six packets of seeds.
In a month, silly ass,
$ He was covered with grass
1 And he couldn't sit down for the weeds.
1
The latter is the polite version, and if I recall correctly was
recorded in some polite anthology. This adventure is some-
what literary and smacks of Baron Munchausen. To my
knowledge it has no basis in fact, alt ho I have known people
who were dirty enough to grow a garden on. If your ear is
good you will note that line 2 of item 2 above is a four
stress line - an unpleasing irregularity which I have not
altered since I am recording not writing or rewriting this
folk-lore.
LEIGH
There was a young plumber of Leigh
Who was plumbing his girl by the sea
Said she: "Stop your plumbing
There's somebody coming."
Said the plumber still plumbing, "It's me."
There is a variant for lines 3-5:
When she said, "Somebody's coming!"
He answered (still plumbing)
"If anyone's coming it's me!"
This is Arnold Bennett's favorite limerick. In 1929 every
man, woman and child in England knew it. Since Norman
Douglas wondered if they would still know it in fifty years
time he printed it. I am sure however, tradition would
keep this masterpiece alive.
105
In time Leigh will no doubt become Lee in this country,
but I have never heard a variant about a fellow named Lee -
yet. One is however given in - Americana Sexualis - where
under "to plumb" we find:
There was a young man from Dundee
Who was plumbing his girl 'neath a tree.
She cried, "Stop your plumbing
I hear someone coming!"
He replied, "Never mind it's just me!"(l)
LOCH LEVEN
There was a young man of Loch Leven
Who went for a walk about seven.
He fell into a pit
That was brimful of shit
And now the poor buggar's in heaven.
"At seven P.M. it is dark in an autumn or winter month
at the latitude of Loch Leven, so the accident is under-
standable. The rime, however, must be English or Ameri-
can, not Scotch, and is naturally faulty.
The shit-pits as they were called, used to be very common
in England. Fabyans Chronicles (1516) relate that in 1252 a
Jew of Tewkesbury fell into one on a Saturday and refused
to be taken out on his Sabbath; whereupon the Earl of
Gloucester who was not to be outdone in his religious zeal,
refused to take him out on Sunday. On Monday he was
found to be dead. They were introduced into Scotland
about 150 years ago by one James McPherson, a tea mer-
chant and shrewd pioneer, who had observed them in China
where they are known as pupu holes. To disappear into an
unfenced pupu hole - if fenced around how are you going
to use it ? - is an ordinary form of death out there, and even
in Scotland such fatal accidents have lately become so
frequent that the custom despite its obvious convenience
is beginning to lose ground.
(I) Americana Sexualis—compiled and edited by Justinian, Privately Printed,
Chicago, N.D. (40 pages). (A Dictionary of Contemporary American Porno-
graphic Words, Terms, Phrases and Idioms with their Modern Usages, etc.)
106
As to the victim being in Heaven, we must take our poet's
word for that. I think unless they have fished him out, he
will be found where he was." The foregoing is Douglas'
immortal commentary.
You will note the verse at the outset recalls the girl from
Devon who had a bad experience with priests. The words
Devon and Loch Leven may eventually become interchange-
able.
LEWELLYN
There was a young maid named Lewellyn
Whose tits were as big as a melon.
Her tits were big, true!
But her box was big too,
Like a hand-painted, colored aerial view
Of the Gape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellen.
How that extra line got in there is beyond me, but there it
is, supplying suspense while the last line merely supplies
dimension.
LITCHEN
There was a young lady from Litchen
Who was scratching her cunt in the kitchen.
Her mother said, "Rose,
It's crabs I suppose?"
"Yes, and by Jesus, they're itching."
There was a young lady of Hitchin
Who was scratching her cunt in the kitchen;
Her father said, "Rose,
It's the crabs, I suppose,"
"You're right, pa, and the buggars are itching'.
LOUTH
There was a young lady of Louth
Who returned from a trip in the South.
Her father said: "Nelly,
There's more in your belly
Than ever went in at your mouth!"
107
Personally, I feel that the word Louth is too foreign to us,
the place is not well known. This version from - Anecdota
Americana - is my choice:
There was a young lady of Thrace,
Whose corsets grew too tight to lace
Her mother said, "Nelly,
There's more in your belly
Than ever went in through your face."
Douglas calls Louth an elegant example of the Golden Per-
iod, and says that the words uttered by the father suffice
to date this poem: it belongs to the Victorian era, for no
modern parent would dream of addressing his grown-up
daughter in such terms. This verse is authenticated by the
somewhat similar idea in the story of the girl who was told
never to allow a man to have intercourse with her, but not
told why. This exuberant creature had considerable misin-
formation about the sexual function, and after a date re-
marked to her mother that she would never be able to have
a baby. "Why?" queried her mother. "Because," replied
our heroine, "I don't think I'll ever be able to swallow that
stuff!"
LOUVIES
There was a young fellow named Louvies
Who tickled his girl in the boovies
And as she contorted,
He looked down and snorted
My prick wants to get into your movies.
This naive bit is included because it discovers the word
"boovies," undoutedly a corruption of bubs, boobs, or
boobies or bubbies, an expression frequently used in cer-
tain sections of the country to describe a woman's breasts,
I recall hearing it mostly in the South. However let us con-
sult two authorities. First, - The American Thesaurus of
Slang (121-17) page 121:
"apples, blubbers, boobys, (big) brown eyes,
bubbies, dugs, milk bottles, ninnies, pair of
mammaries, pumps, tits, titties, twins."-
108
but nowhere boovies. Looking farther, we consult
Justinian's -Americana Sexualis -:
' 'Booby, n. Teat. Generally used in the plural,
boobies. Nineteenth and twentieth century
euphemism for the vulgarism 'tit.' "
But nowhere can I find scholarly proof that boovies is a
good colloquialism. We are therefore forced pending further
evidence to assume that the word is a coinage of recent
vintage, and not in good use yet.
Actually this verse is forced, schoolboyish, naively anthro-
pomorphic. I do not rate it highly.
LUGGER
There was a young mate of a lugger
Who took a girl out just to hug her
"I've my monthlies," she said,
"And a cold in my head,
But my bowels work well, do you bugger?"
This forward young minx was in pretty poor shape to be
going out at all. If the fellow was just going to hug her,
there was hardly any need of the girl volunteering all this
unpleasant information. "Mug" would go better here than
"hug" as it has more inclusive connotations. I am sorry
not to be more of an authority on buggarey so as to be
able to elaborate on the last line. As things stand you will
have to rely on the unknown poet's implication of the re-
lation between bowel movements and successful anal in-
tercourse. The whole matter is somewhat distasteful, so if
you will overlook this defection in my scholarship we can
pass on. If you will not, you may consult the note below.(l)
LYNN
There was a young woman of Lynn
Whose mother would keep her from sin.
So she filled up her crack
With cement and shellac
But the men picked it out with a pin!
(I) The Horn Book definitely states that confirmed buggarers always make
sure that their victim has not had a bowel movement before intercourse.
109
There was a young fellow from Lynn
Whose cock was the size of a pin.
Said his girl with a laugh
As she felt of his staff
" — This — won't be much of a sin."
Probably his name was Wynn, for:
There was a young lady of Lynn
In bed with a fellow named Wynn.
Tho he tried his best
And diddled with zest
She kept asking, "My love, is it in?"
He was bothered all his life with this prehensile member:
Full ninety years old was friend Wynn
When he went to a hookshop to sin.
But try as he would
It did him no good
For all he had left was the skin.
And an inanity:
There was a young lady from Lynn
Who considered that fucking was sin.
But when she was tight
It seemed quite all right,
So everyone filled her with gin.
A variant gives us this lady's name:
There was a young lady named Min,
Who thought that to love was a sin
Etc.
A parlor version, like:
There was a young lady from Lynn
Who was deep in original sin.
When they said, "Do be good."
She said, "Would if I could."
And straightway went at it again.
110
M
MADRAS
There was a young man of Madras
Who was having a boy in the grass,
When a cobra-capello
Said, "Hello, young fellow!"
And bit a piece out of his ass.
Only a naturalist (good man, he) could have thought of
this one. That eobra-capello is rather too erudite. Perhaps
the first two lines are genuine and of real quality. The last
three are certainly silly and forced.
There was a young girl of Madras
Who was proud of her beautiful ass.
4Twas not plump and pink
As you lewd fellows think,
It was brown, it had ears, and ate grass!
MADRID
There was an old man of Madrid
Who cast loving eyes on a kid.
He said, "0 my joy!
I'll buggar that boy
You see if I don't," and he did.
A variant to the last line is, as Norman Douglas says, a little
gross:
And he out with his cock, and he did.
There was a cute girl from Madrid
Who was naughty in all that she did
She played strip poker
Uutil it broke her
Which made her a popular kid.
Ill
There is a sharp falling off in the last three lines of the
above, especially in quality. It is not much better than
this one:
There was a young man from Madrid
Who was hit with a brick by a kid
Said the man, "O what a joy
To wallop that boy!
Be darned if I don't." And he did!
The kinship of this with the first verse is painfully obvious.
But we won't go into that chicken-egg business here!
MAINE
There was a young lady in Maine
Who had a young man on the brain.
He swore he was true
But between me and you
He fooled her again and again.
This is inane. Some Yankee puritan must have gotten
hold of a good limerick and sterilized it, for I feel that the
first two lines have promise.
MAKE (Verb)
There was a young girl who would make
Advances to snake after snake.
She said, "I'm not vicious
But so superstitious
I do it for Grandmother's sake."
This one leaves me speechless. Snake? Didn't the poet
mean rake?
MARINE
There was a young Royal Marine
Who tried to fart "God save the Queen!"
When he reached the soprano
Out came the guano,
And his breeches weren't fit to be seen.
This fellow can also be from Racine or named McClean, or
from Wood Green.
On the same topic:
There was an old man from roop
Who lost control of his poop
112
While dining one day
What should his wife say
But, "Stop making that noise with your soup!"
The whole question of farting is very dear to the heart of
the people. And in any of the stories a little fecal matter
always disqualifies the truly expert farter. I quote from
- An Essay on Wind: -
4'The famous Higson who shit over a sign post 22 feet
high at Wilton, for a considerable wager, made by the Lord
Pembroke, was also a famous farter. He would extinguish
a flambeau by a doublefart; and once he laid a wager that
he would extinguish twenty-four large mould candles, each
at one yard, by twenty four successive and rapid single farts.
Higson would have won his wager, for he had actually ex-
tinguished three and twenty of them; but in the last he
was determined, from a low vanity, to wind up his bottom
by an uncommon exertion; but in this, as it often happens
with bravadoes in attempting works of supererogation he
failed; for it was confessedly a noble fart, yet he beshit the
candle, and so lost his wager. These farts may be classed as
- supererogation farts." - Now we have disposed of the
fecal aspects of this verse we can go on to the musical.
The farting blacksmith Simon there was who could
accompany any musical instrument - "so admirable in
time, tone, and tune as to deceive the nicest judges." He
could have carried "God Save the Queen'' as a solo, no
doubt, and since he could imitate a flute certainly would
have had no trouble with high notes. He was also called
Bellows Tup! There is an innocent little verse quoted by
Bok which gives us still other problems involving sopranos:
There was a young lady named Anna
Who in church sang the highest soprano.
When she fell on the stair
The tenor said, "There!
I've heard, now I've seen your Hosanna."(l)
(I) Edward W. Bok—Perhaps I Am—New York: Chas. Scribners Son, 1928.
Pages 87-100 deal with limericks.
113
MAUD
There was a young maftfen named Maud
A terrible society fraud."
? In company, Vtri told
She was awfully cold
But if you got her alone, Oh God!
This is typical of the limerology in - Immortalia - some-
thing just on the line*
MAY
There was a young lady named May
Who frigged (herself in the hay.
She bought a pickle
One for a nickle ,*
And wore all the warts away!
Like our eccentric young miss (Q.y.) this lady typifies those
stories about young girjs sticking different things in their
vaginas, Stories did I say? Facts, unfortunately which can
be substafl^ated* One woman used the corner of a pillow.(l)
In-The, Eternal Eve- opposite page, J.09 is a picture of a
woman using a candle. In - The Scented Garden - we find
specific mention of the pickle. I quote from page 301, "In
TurJ&ey and in Egypt t^y titilize such natural products
which resemble the penis in appearance. The banana in
shape and size seems to have been created for this purpose.
The cucumber is considered the same as the banana." In
our country the candle is considered more csffete.
^V-^' '■■•■- McBRIDE
There was a young man named McBride
Who fell in a privy and died.
Along came his brother
And fell in another
And there they were interred side by side.
There was a young man from Kilbride
Who fell down a sewer and died.
(I) Wilhelm Stelcel—-Frigidity in Woman^New York: Liveright Publishing
Corp. (2 vols.), 1926. Vol. 1, P^ 123. \
114
Now he had a brother
Who fell down another
And now they're interred side by side.
This last variant crept into the - The Complete Limerick
Book - somehow. People have fallen in privies, you surely
recall the incident in - The Specialist - by Chic Sale. To be
in turd*is a vile pun -- something usually beyond the pale
of the unknown poet, but somehow I have the feeling this
verse is genuine. I take it the McBrides use a two holer.
MISS
There was an aesthetic young miss
Who thought it the apex of bliss
To jazz herself silly
With the bud of a lilly
Then go to the garden and piss!
See the comment under "May." We can't go into this mat-
ter of inserting extraneous objects in the vagina too often!
This limerick does record however that the feminihe ure-
thra is capable of exerting pleasure. I recall seeing a large
bottle full of hairpins in a medical school museum, and
inquiring what pleasure women got out of diddling them-
selves with hairpins, to my horror and surprize, I learned
that these objects had been removed from female urethras
and bladders, - not - vaginas. The years have lessened my
surprize at the act, but I am still amazed at the - number -
of cases represented in that morbid bottle, especially since
the population of the city where I saw the bottle was only
200,000.
This matter is fully discussed on pages 40-41 of - Disorders
of the Sexual Function - by Huhner (F.A. Davis Co., Phila-
delphia, 1920). And thither I refer you for more professional
data. He mentions pillow masturbation, the use of a key
or other instrument, tallow candles, bananas, cucumbers
and similar fruit - which I take it would include lily buds.
MOLLY
There was a young dolly named Molly,
Who thought that to frig was just folly;
115
She said; "Your pee pee
Means nothing to me!
But I'll do it just to be jolly!"
MONTEZUMA
There was a young Prince of Montezuma
Who had an affair with a puma.
The Puma in play
Clawfed both balls away:
An example of animal humor.
MONTROSE
There was a young man from Montrose
Who diddled himself with his toes.
He could do it so neat
He fell in love with his feet
And christened them Myrtle and Rose.
What a contrast this - Immortalia - contortionist is with
Arnold Bennett's:
There was a young man from Montrose
Who had pockets in none of his clothes
When asked by his lass
Where he carried his brass
He said, "Darling, I pay through the nose!"
There was also a contortionist from Nantucket whom if you
are interested in the topic, you should investigate.
MYRTLE
There was a young lady named Myrtle
Who had an affair with a turtle.
With motions phenomenal
And contortions abdominal
The turtle made Myrtle fertile.
Or if you prefer:
There was a young lady named Myrtle,
She went to bed with a turtle.
She had crabs so they say
In a year and a day,
Which proves that the turtle was fertile.
116
N
NANTUCKET
There was a young man of Nantucket
Whose cock was so long he could suck it.
He said, with a grin,
As he wiped off his chin,
"If my ear were a cunt I could fuck it."
Besides this classic (which has a homely variant as follows:
He said with a lear
As he wiped off his ear
If my mouth etc. etc.)
we find Nantucket recurring as follows:
There was an old girl of Nantucket
Who went down to hell in a bucket.
When asked to come out.
She replied with a shout
"Arse holes - you buggars! And suck it!"
Or:
There was an old lady named Tucket.
Who went to hell in a bucket
When she got there
They asked for her fare
And she lifted her skirts and said, "Suck it!"
I guess that just about takes care of the "ucket" rime - (a
thing most dear to the popular heart) except for the pun-
ning verses ending up "Nan took it" or "Paw took it," pop-
ular in college papers, and telling what became of some '
money kept in a bucket.
NASHVILLE, TENN.
There was a young lady from Nashville, Tenn.
Who diddled herself with a fountain pen.
The cap came off
The ink ran wild
And now she's in bed with a colored child.
117
The chief interest in this verse is the unfamiliar rime
scheme. Line 3 is unrimed altogether . And yet the con-
coction hangs together quite well.
The poem may well represent an idea in the transitional
stage between nasty little boy's verses and the immortal
limerick.
NATAL
There was a young man of Natal
Who was fucking a Hottentot gal.
She said, "You're a sluggard!"
He said, "You be buggared!"
I want to fuck slow, and I shall!"
Or:
There was a young man of Natal
And Sue was the name of his gal.
He went out one day
For a damned long way
Right up his Suez Canal.
The striking thing about this pair is their acute dissimilar-
ity. The Hottentots always come in for their share of no-
toriety in any discussion of things sexual. More seems
known about their propensities, their aprons, their large
nates, than about most races.
NATCHEZ
There was a young lady from Natchez
Who fell in some nettle wood patches
She took down her britches
Said, "Ouch, but it itches."
And scratches and scratches and scratches.
A very poor example, at least as it comes my way. Briars
are more common than nettles, and are more often referred
to as patches, in the South.
There was a young couple from Natchez
Who liked fucking in briarwood patches.
When asked to explain
He said, "It is plain
When it itches, she twitches and scratches."
Even this version leaves much to be desired.
118
NATIVITY (DOUBTFUL)
There was a young lady of doubtful nativity
Who was possessed of unusual sensitivity.
She could sit on the lap
Of a Nazi or Jap
And detect Fifth Column activity.
NEWCASTLE
There was a young man of Newcastle
Who tied up some shit in a parcel
And sent it to Spain
With a note to explain
That it came from his grandmother's arsell.
Douglas:
"Readers will naturally be anxious to learn the contents
of this note. It is addressed to the Spanish Ministry of
Agriculture.
Sir:
My business often takes me to Spanish ports where I
see a deal of waist land about. I arsked why not manuer it ?
They say, becose weve got no cows in Spain. I arsked why
not use your own shit? They say becose we don't eat much
in Spain so we can't shit properly. That is why I send you
with this post a sample of our Newcastle stuff, it comes
from my grandmother who is a hearty old lady free from all
teint of desease. Perhaps you will have it anilised and I can
supply you with tons of same up to sample strength becose
we people, coal miners tho we be, do eat properly and shit
properly f. o. b. Newcastle to any Spanish port at reason-
able charges and so change your country from a wilderness
into a smiling Paridise and I don't think your people would
mind the smell very much once they get used to it.
Yrs. obediently,
119
The well known author Anon in - Essays on Wind, - p. 13
gives a very low opinion of French Manure. I quote:
"Before I conclude, I must inform you that at Paris
Fnglish turd for manuring the land is exorbitantly dear. *
Servants will not ask wages of a good English family if they
are allowed to sell the family turd, which, with a mixture
of bad Parisian turd, they cheat their countrymen, calling
it - la veritable turd Angloise - and hawking it about the
streets in as strong handsome cases as tho each of them
contained a bulse of diamonds. The following facts will
serve to show you how highly they estimate the English turd:
To make a long story short, a fellow robbed him of his
treasure, they fought, were apprehended, tried, fined 2
francs, and the money bound over to the English groom for
having his property stolen in the streets of Paris in the open
day I The dissertation concludes saliently:
An English groom belonging to the Due d' Orleans was
one day shitting a-la-mode Angloise (ie oyer a rail) in the
Rue St. Honore when a well-dressed ¥rendhmari came slily
up behind him and caught the ptedious manure in his hat
and ran oft with itJ" >;
UI do assure you, my amiable Secretary , that I have
not seen one turd of any magnitude, shape, or colour since
I have been in France. The whole French Nation seem to be
in a dysentery; and what with their frequent bleedings and
lavements, I think they will all soon be In a decline.'*
The same homely paragraphs apply just as aptly to
Spain, so I will not delete them.
There was a young girl of Newcastle
Whose charms were declared universal.
While one man in front,
Would work on her cunt,
Another was engaged at her asshole.
120
o
OHIO
There was a young girl in Ohio
Whose baptismal name was Maria
She would put on great airs
And piss on the stairs
If she thought that no one was nigh her.
OSTEND
There was a young man of Ostend
Who let a girl play with his end.
She took hold of Rover,
And looked it all over,
And it did what she didn't intend.
There was a young girl of Ostend
Who her maidenhead tried to defend
But a Chausseur d'Afrique
Inserted his prick
And taught the young girl how to spend.
And the usual inanity:
There was a young man of Ostend
Who vowed he'd hold out to the end.
But when half way over
From Calais to Dover
He did what he didn't intend.
121
PAT
There was an old man called Pat
The cheeks of his ass were so fat
They had to be parted
Whenever he farted
And also whenever he shat!
And quite variously:
There was a young lady named Pat
Who had triplets: Tim, Tip, and Tat
It was fun in the breeding
But hell at the feeding
For there was always no tit for Tat.
Shat is good people's English for the past tense of shit, and
is sometimes used as a verb form, seldom if ever as a noun.
(See Corfu.) Shitted is almost never heard; shite is almost
a euphemism. Sometimes the first line goes:
There was an old man of Surat.„ : „
PAUL
There was a young fellow named Paul
Whose cock was exceedingly small.
He buggared a bug
On the edge of a rug
And the bug didn't know it at all!
This fellow would never be a nuisance in society anyway.
This barren verse is as good a place as any to discuss the
curious etymology of bugger, or buggar. Norman Douglas
spells it with an "a," but - The American Thesaurus of
Slang - and - American Sexualis - both use the "e." The
"e," the softer form of the word is a purer form. It is used
to indicate: an indefinite object; bug-eyes; a little bugger
(beggar?);to bungle or botch; a ghost (bogy) ; a contempt-
ible person; a person with bulging eyes; and finally as a
verb meaning to commit sodomy. If, - Americana Sexualis-,
122
(p. 14) is right, and the word is derived from the Latin Bul-
garus meaning a Bulgarian, one would assume buggar is
the better word. This source says the word is obsolescent.
I would agree that its deeper meaning is going out of use,
for like so many expressions its use is taken up by so many
people that it becomes attenuated. Bugger or .buggar is a
useful word, ranging from a synonym for nose candy to
meaning having intercourse with animals or anal inter-
course. The words are interchangeable we are forced to as-
sume, and I have made no special effort to be consistent
since the etymology is so confused and obscure.
PEARSE
In spring Miss May marries Pearse
'Til then their pash' they disburse
With a thin piece of rubber
There's no need to scrub *er,
And of course there's no harm to rehearse!
Suspect. "Pash'" - "scrub 'er" are weak. Copulation by
engaged couples is increasingly approved(l) so it is naturally
to be assumed that rubbers or condoms or cundrums will
be used. Douches are unreliable in rehearsal.
The following table(2) gives the trend of popular thinking
along the lines of this limerick.
SEX IN THE CLASSROOM
THE STUDENTS' ANSWER
(Figures are percentages)
Subject Desirable Permissable Wrong
Kissing on dates 27 72
1
"Heavy" petting on dates 3 21 87
"Heavy" petting for engaged 13 61 26
couples
Premarital sex experience 10 31 59
for men
Premarital sex experience 2 19 79
for women
(1) Reader's Digest, February, 1946, p. 15. "Sex in the Classroom."
(2) Ibid.
123
Intercourse with a prostitude 0.3 9.5 90.2
Intercourse between engaged 3 27 70
persons
Intercourse without expectation 2 16 82
of marriage
Use of contraceptives 65 28 7
PELICAN
A wonderful old bird is the Pelican
Whose beak holds more than its belly can;
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week
I'm damned if I know how in the hell he can.
This piece by Dixon Merritt is of course a classic, and part
of the Gulf School of Limerology which includes also:
A crab is a wonderful critter
A natural born go-getter;
If she loses a claw
She don't run to her maw
But grows a new one to fit her.
These chaste classical verses, have to my knowledge, never
been parodied. They are here more for the record than any-
thing else.
PERU
There was a young man of Peru
Who dreamt he was had by a Jew;
He woke up one night
In a hell of a fright
And found it was perfectly true.
This was variously cleaned up as follows:
There was a young man of Peru
Who dreamt he was eating a shoe;
He woke in the night
In a terrible fright
And found it was perfectly true.
124
Or:
There was a young man of Peru
Who had nothing at all to do;
So he sat on the stairs,
And counted his hairs
And found he had seventy-two.
The variants are interesting. What amazes me is that Anon
never used the riming word screw (skee rew). There is a
bare possibility that a corruption of the second line of this
variant might employ the neglected rime:
There was a young girl of Peru
Who decided her lovers too few.
So she walked from her door
With a fig-leaf, no more,
And now she's in bed--with the flu!
And there is also the diet matter again:
There was a young man of Peru
Who lived upon clap juice and sp§w;
When these palled to his taste,
He tried some turd paste
And said that was very good too.
There was a young man of Peru
Who had nothing whatever to do;
So he took out his carrot
And buggared his parrot
And sent the results to the zoo.
PICTURE-PALACES
The girls who frequent picture-palaces
Set no store by psychoanalysis
And though Mr. Freud
Is greatly annoyed,
They cling to their old fashion phalluses.
TO PISS (VERB)
There was an old man who could piss
Thru a ring — and, what's more never miss.
125
People came by the score
And bellowed: "Encore
Won't you do it again, Sir? Bis! Bis!"
This matter of skillful pissing cannot be easily authenti-
cated. There is the story of the irate parent who was bera-
ting another and more tolerant parent because the son of
one had written the name of the,other's daughter in urine
in the new snow. You surely recall the denouement about
the writing being in the girl's handwriting!
Bis of course does not rime with miss or piss, so the rime
spoken is not as good as the rime written. Bis rimes with
peace, and while "piss" is sometimes pronounced "pees"
"miss" would never get by. (Recall the judge who greeted
the Italian, "Peace be on you," and the Italian replied,
"Pees on you too judge!") The World's Fairs have had fa-
mous farters as attractions; they might have had famous
pissers too!
PITLOCHERY
There was a young girl of Pitlochery
Who was had by a man in a rockery.
She said, "Oh! you've come
All over my bum;
This isn't a fuck it's a mockery."
And somewhat in the same vein:
There was an old man of Gannaught,
Whose prick was remarkably short.
When he got into bed
The old woman said,
"This isn't a prick, it's a wart."
PLAINS
There was a young man from the plains
Who had more bollocks than brains.
He stood on a stool
To fuck an old mule
* And got kicked in the balls for his pains.
126
In - The Sexual History of the World War - this problem is
discussed on pages 88-9. * 'The usual offenders were Hun-
garian Hussars who used for sexual purposes the mares en-
trusted to their care..... at least ten percent participated."
Almost every frank sexual history of certain types of mal-
adjusted people somewhere includes coition with animals.
For example, and I quote ".....and when his brother left
him, made use of the she goats in order to satisfy himself.
He practised anal and not vulvary coition upon them, and
derived much pleasure from it." There follows a brief de-
scription of the lad's sport with a male dog, and resumes,
"His master dismissed him for half killing the he-goat
which disturbed him when he was mountingthe she-goats.
(- Sic --)"(1) A just retribution like that suffered by the man
from the plains.
POOLE
There was a young fellow named Poole
Who found red rings round his tool.
He rushed to the clinic
Where the Doctor, a cynic,
Said, "Wash it off — its lipstick, you fool!"
PRIEST
There was a young Anglican Priest
Who lived almost wholly on yeast,
For he said, "It is plain
We must all rise again
And I want to get started at least."
This got into - What's Funny and Why - on p. 64. I think
v it a rather good example of the marginal limerick, one which
hints of sacrilege, but does not quite commit it. No Cath-
olic priest would be so silly as this. He knows he can buy
his way out of any purgatory that he can devise, so he doesn't
have to start as soon as the more credulous Anglicans. His
chief concern is laying up the wherewithal which he does
by bailing other people out. A nice business. He can't lose,
and doesn't have to eat yeast either.
(I) Dr. Jacobus X . . . Crossways of Sex—New York: American Anthro-
pological Society, Privately Printed, not dated (380 pages). Quotation is from
page 63.
127
R
RACINE
There was a young man from Racine.
Who invented a fucking machine
Concave or convex
To suit either sex,
It was perfectly easy to clean.
A variant to the last line comes in several forms:
a) And remarkably easy to clean.
b) With a cunt to catch all the cream.
c) The God-damndest thing ever seen.
d) And guaranteed used by the Queen.
Sometimes too, it starts off:
There was a young man called McClean.
The same problem is covered under Bombay Q.V. It is ob-
vious that this type of lyric perpetuates the crop of stories
about the rubber whore. Lately the Russians had one.
RANSOM
There was a young fellow from Ransom
Who diddled his girl in a hansom.
They ripped off three or four,
And when she still wanted more,
He said, "Lady, the name's Simpson, not Samson!'1
128
REX
There was a young fellow called Rex
Who was constantly troubled with sex.
When charged with exposure
He said, with composure,
"De minimis non curat lex!"
This verse is an example of just how spontaneous and
timely the limerick can be. It sprang full grown from the
silly portal-to-portal suits, and from the side of the judge
who had the good sense to recall the old Roman saw that
the law does not concern itself with trifles.
RHEIMS
Their was an archbishop of Rheims
Who played with himself iti his dreams;
He painted a cunt
On his nightshirt in front,
Which made him squirt jism in streams.
ROBLES
There was an old fellow named Robels
Who went to dine with some nobles.
At the risk of his life
He fucked his host's wife
And now 'tis said he has no balls.
ROUE
Therf was a rich old roue
Who felt himself slipping away.
He endowed a large ward
In a house where he'd whored.
Was there a crowd at his funeral? I'll say!
129
ROSE MADDER
While Titian was mixing rose madder,
His model climbed up on a ladder,
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition,
So he climbed up the ladder and had her.(l)
In this same artistic vein:
There was a young sculptor named Phidias
Whose statues by some were thought hideous.
He made Aphrodite
Without even a nighty,
Which shocked all the fussy fastidious.
ROSETTI
The intestines of Dante Rossetti
Were excessively frail and petty
All he could eat
Was finely chopped meat
And all he could shit was spaghetti.
This verse from the people contrasts sharply with the es-
thete's own Pre-raphaelite verse about himself:
There is a poor sneak named Rossetti
As a painter with many kicks met he.
With more than a man
But sometimes he ran
And that saved the rear of Rosetti.
(l) Note that this position is not documented among the 62 given in Chap-
ter I, (Positions giving complete en*|oyment to two lovers) Section I (Postures
with introduction of the member) Division I (Introduction of the cock in the
cunt) of—The Horn Book—A girl's guide to the knowledge of good and evil, The
Erotica Biblion Society, London, 1899, pp 58-119. This verse therefore
represents
more of a mental than a physical exercise on Titian's part.
130
s
ST. CLAIR
There was a young man of St. Clair
Who tried to buggar a bear
But the nasty old brute
Took a snatch at his root
And left nothing but bollocks and hair.
This man was not a hardy pioneer. The second verse of
' 'The Pioneers'' goes:
When cunt is rare they fuck a bear
They knife him if he snitches.
They knock their cocks against the rocks
Those hardy sons of bitches.(l)
You will note the use of the word bollocks. Actually the
word is ballocks, from which our word balls is derived,
coming from the old English word ballocks meaning parson
or rector, since such men were notoriously men of parts.(2)
Many limericks commemorate this, for example, Kew (Q.V.)
In- Strange Loves - there is a list of animals men have cop-
ulated with. Bears are listed. I quote from page 17:
"We have indisputable evidence that men and women
have had intercourse with dogs, horses and mares, cattle,
goats, sheep, pigs, hens, ducks, llamas, geese, apes, bears,
torn cats, and even fish."
ST. GILES
From the depths of the crypts of St. Giles
Came a scream that was heard for ten miles.
"O goodness gracious,"
Said brother Ignatius,
"I forgot that the Bishop had piles!"
This limerick is so nearly perfect in form and content it
needs no comment, other than to caution against sodomy
with persons who have any rectal disorders.
( I) Immortalia—p. 27.
(2) Americana Sexualis—p. 12.
_ __
131
ST. PAULS
Said the venerable Dean of St. Pauls
"Concerning the cracks in them walls
Do you think it would do
If we filled them with glue?"
And the Bishop of Lincoln said, "Balls!"
Douglas regards the incidence as apocryphal. Since the
cathedral stood the German bombs, he is no doubt right.
However to fne it recalls a striving by the people to com-
press one pf their lyrics like:
'Twas Christmas in the Harem
And the eunuchs all were there
Watching the sultan's daughters
Combing their golden hair,
When a voice resounded down the marble halls
Echoing from wall to wall
"What do you want for Christmas?"
And the eunuchs answered, "Balls!"
Or again:
"Balls" cried the King, and the King laughed
because he had to, the Queen laughed because
she wanted to, and the Princess laughed
because she'd like to.
A mild American variant:
There was a young girl of St. Paul
Who went to a newspaper ball.
Her dress caught on fire
And burned her entire
Front page, sport section, and all.
ST. LOUIS
There was a young Juliet of St. Louis
Who stood on a balcony acting screwy
Her Romeo climbed
But he wasn't well timed
And half way up, off he went-bloo-ie!
This hair trigger gent really doesn't deserve a place here.
132
SAKI
There was a young lady named Saki
Who had an affair with a darkey.
The result of her sins
Was quadruplets not twins
One white, one black, and two kahki.
The same misogenistic problem also plagues the East:
There was a young girl from Japan
Who married a hottentot man
The lady was yellow
And he a dark fellow
So the children were all black and tan.
SAMOA
There was a young girl of Samoa
Who determined that no one should know her.
One young fellow tried
But she wriggled aside
And spilled all the spermatozoa.
v
SANTANDER
There was an old man of Santander
Who attempted to buggar a gander;
But the silly old bird
Stuffed its arse with a turd
And fooled the old man of Santander.
And the similar:
There was an old man of Toulouse
Who tried to buggar a goose;
But the wise old bird
Plugged its ass with a turd
And foiled the old man of Toulouse.
133
SCOTT
There was a young fellow named Scott
Who took a young girl on his yacht.
Too lazy to rape her
He made darts of brown paper
Which he languidly tossed at her twat.
The fourth line has an alternate;
"He made darts out of paper."
The maiden aunt of this fine verse goes:
There was a young man with a yacht
Who said whether you love me or not
You can hardly refuse
Just to come for a cruise
But she fainted away on the spot.(l)
No doubt at the thought of another ordeal by darts!
SEA
There was a young lady at sea
Who complained that it hurt her to pee.
"That accounts," said the mate,
"For the intolerable fate
Of the captain, the cook and of me."
A minor variation occurs in the couplet
"I see," said the mate,
"That accounts for the fate
or: *
Said the brawny old mate, *
"That accounts for the fate
Of the captain, the purser and me."
(I) From—A Lyttel Book of Nonsense—by Randall Davies, London: Mac-
millan Co., Ltd., 1912, p. 122. This little book is delightfully illustrated
with
medieval prints and the verses while chaste are not run of the mill.
134
SIBERIA
There was a young monk from Siberia
Who of frigging grew wearier and wearier*
At last with a yell
He burst from his cell
And buggared the Father Superior.
Another version has him jumping from his cell and engag-
ing in coitus in ano with the Mother Superior. Again with
a hell of a yell he bursts from his you know what by now
and elopes with her. Another variant is more distinctive:
There was a young monk from Siberia
Who had a complex inferior;
He did to a nun
What he shouldn't have done
And now she's a Mother Superior.
A variant for lines 3 and 4 runs:
So one night after prayers
He bolted upstairs ....
Etc.
SILESIA,
There was an old girl of Silesia
Who said, "As my cunt doesn't please yer,
i You might as well come
< Up my slimy old bum,
< So Jimmy the tapeworm don't seize yer."
c
j A more sensible (less contradictory) version from - Im-
mortalia -:
There was a young girl of Cilesia
Who said if my twat don't please ya
And if you don't mind
You may try my behind
But be careful my tapeworm don't seize ya.
135
SKINNER
There was a young fellow named Skinner
Who had a young lady to dinner.
They sat down to dine'
At half after nine
At ten it was in her — the dinner
( Not Skinner, Skinner the sinner
Was in her before dinner! )
There is another conjoint classic in this same vein:
There was a young fellow named Tupper
Who had a young lady to supper.
They sat down to dine
At quarter past nine,
At ten he was up her — not Tupper
(Skinner the sinner was in her.
Tupper was up her before supper).
And one chastely dug up by Louis Untermeyer(l)
There was a young fellow named Tate
Who dined with his girl at 8:08.
But I'd hate to relate
What that person named Tate
And his tete a tete ate at 8:08.
Back from this sterile exercise to Skinner, we also find
There was a young lady named Skinner
Who dreamt that her lover was in her.
She woke with a start
And let a loud fart
Which was followed by luncheon and dinner.
SLOUGH
There was a young lady of Slough
Who said she didn't know how.
Then a young fellow caught her
And jolly well taught her
So she lodges in Pimlico now.
(I) Louis Untermeyer—Poetry and Its Appreciation.
136
SOCHIPPER
A young cabin boy from Sochipper
Was as cute as a little red nipper.
He filled up his ass
With small bits of glass
And circumsized the skipper.
This is obviously a steal from the poem:
The good ship's name was Venus
The captain's name was Penis
The figure head a whore in bed
A pretty sight by Jesus! etc. etc.
SPITZBERGEN
There was a young girl of Spitzbergen
Whose folks all thought her a virgin,
Till they found her in bed
With her quim fiery red
And the head of a kid just emergin'!
I stf ongly suspect the existence of a variant which might
go:
There was a young lady named Sturgeon
Or:
There was a young lady, a virgin,
Who had an affair with a sturgeon.
She took to her bed
With her quim very red
And the head of the fish just emergin'.
STAMBOUL
There was an old man of Stamboul
With a vericose vein in his tool.
In attempting to come
Up a little boy's bum
It burst, and he did look a fool.
137
T
THUN
There was a young lady of Thun
Who was blocked by the man in the moon.
"Well, it has been great fun,"
She remarked when he'd done,
"But I'm sorry you came quite so soon."
The universal grievance of all civilized women, says Nor-
man Douglas. The copulatory art has to be learnt unless
we want to remain on the level of the beast. "They come
and go like dogs," a little Arab child once remarked to
Douglas about the European's bedside manners.
TUNBRIDGE CREEK
There was a young maid from Tunbridge Greek
Who had her monthlies twice a week.
"How very provokin",
Said a girl from Hoboken,
"No time for pokin' so to speak."
Or a close cousin
There was a young lady of Barking Creek
Who used to have monthlies twice a week.
A fellow from Woking
Said, "How provoking
You don't get any poking so to speak."
TURK
A young Swede who felt like a Turk
Fell asleep one night after work.
He had a wet dream
But woke it would seem
In time to give it a jerk.
There is a case recorded of a man who masturbated in his
sleep. He had a wire cage made in which he locked himself
at night by strapping it around his middle, and throwing
the key onto the floor. (■- Sexual Debility in Man,-p. 103-4).
This prevented him from giving it that last lick.
138
mmmmmm
TWICKENHAM
There was a young lady of Twickenham
Who regretted that men had no prick in 'em(l).
On her knees every day
To God she would pray
To lengthen and strengthen and thicken 'em.
A variant to the first four lines:
There was an old maid of Twickenham
Who took on all cocks without picking 'em.
She knelt on the sod
And prayed to her God,
To lengthen and strengthen and thicken 'em.
And an inanity-quite a mess by Oliver Herford:
There was a young lady of Twickenham
Whose boots were too tight to walk quick in 'em
She wore them awhile
And at last on a style
She pulled them off and was sick in 'em.
This lengthen and strengthen 'em business shows our girl
didn't get around like Fanny Hill. I quote: "......for
that machine of his, which I had, by its appearance taken
for an impalpable, or at least a very diminutive subject was
now . . . . grown not only to a prodigious stiffness of erec-
tion, but to a size that frightened even me; a nonpareil
thickness indeed, the head of it alone filled the utmost cap-
acity of my grasp. "(2) Fanny Hill found that wear and
tear and taking all comers resulted in prodigious stretch-
ing of the female organ, and that may account for this
lady's prayer.
(1) Not enough love in 'em—Anecdota Americana variant.
(2) John Cleland—Memoirs of Fanny Hill—Reprint of 1749 Edition, Privately
Printed, Cosmopoli, 1889 (100 copies), 291 pages. Quotation from pages 229-
230.
139
'mmmmmm
I4UI
V
VENICE
There was a young lady of Venice
Who used hard boiled eggs to play tennis
And when they said, "It is wrong."
She replied, "Go along,
You don't'know how prolific my hen is."
w
WAC
Dont dip your wick in a Wac
Don't ride the breast of a Wave
Just sit on the sand
And do it by hand
And buy bonds with the money you save.
This patriotic number is typical of short-lived verses based
on contemporary words like 'Wac' and 'Wave,' and on pure-
ly temporary public movements like bond buying. In spite
of the rime failure in line one, this is a good piece of work.
It has about a 50-50 chance chance of survival. In fact it
will run longer than the story about the men who were
comparing notes. One asked, "Which would you rather
have: A Wac in a shack, A Spar in a car, or a Wave in a
cave?" The other replied, "A sheep in a jeep." This'will
also give you an idea of war time humor during the second
World War.
WALES
There was a young lady from Wales
Who fed on shit, snot and snails.
When she couldn't get these
She fed upon cheese
Which she scraped from her twat with her nails.
140
See also Dot and Marseilles, as well as Corfu and Grott.
An inane variant is found in - The Sphinx and the Mammy -:
A nice man who dwelt at Montvaile
Lived on icicles, snowballs and hail.
And he never ate sleet,
For it gave him cold feet,
But rain he drank pail after pail.
We can conclude the matter of nonsense appetites with:
A Cannibal bold of Penzance
Ate an uncle and two of his aunts,
A cow and calf,
An ox and a half
And now he can't button his pants.
WANTAGE
There was a young lady from Wantage
Of whom the town clerk took advantage.
Said the county surveyor,
"Of course you must pay her,
For you've altered the line of her frontage."
WHITE
There was a young lady named White
Found herself in a terrible plight.
A fellow named Tucker
Struck her, the fucker,
The buggar, the bastard, the shite.
An Einsteinian variant on the same rime pattern:
There was a young lady named White
Whose speed was faster than light.
• She eloped one day
In a relative way
And returned the previous night.
A variant to both is to have the young lady from Wight.
Shite is a good word. I have heard it all my life. It is used
in the South associated with poke e.g. a shite - poke full
- or bag full of shit. Actually it is an obsolete spelling of
the word which derives from the Teutonic and Yiddish
term for excrement, shiseor scheisse. According to Grimm's
rules "s" becomes "t" and so we have our familiar exple-
tive. .
141
WYLDE (WILDE)
There was a young lady named Wylde
Who kept herself quite undefined
By thinking of Jesus
Contagious diseases
And the bother of having a child.
■**
A variant begins as above and continues:
Who for years remained undefiled
Thru thinking of Jesus
And venereal diseases
And the danger of being with child.
Christianity has always seemed to me an utterly selfish re-
ligion. One only attends because of the fear of what might
happen to - oneself - in the afterlife if any of the prescribed
offices were neglected in this one.
WORCESTER
There was an old maid from Worcester
Who dreamt a young man had seduced her;
She awoke with a scream,
To find it a dream:
Only a bump in the mattress had goosed her.
Untermeyer records a silly variant on the rime scheme:
There was an old maid from Worcester
Who had a gift of a rorcester;
In her humble abode,
It crowed and it crowed
Which was more than the spinster was uorcestor.(l)
While - What Cheer - gives:
There was a young lady of Woosester
Who usest to crow like a roosester;
Who usest to climb
Two (Seven?) trees at a time
But her sisester usest to boosest her.(2)
(1) Loiiis Untermeyer—Doorways to Poetry—New York: Harcourt Brace, ,1938.
(2) What Cheer—edited by David McCord, Coward McCann Inc., 1945.
142
WRITE US
Love letters no longer they write us
To their homes they seldom invite us.
Tl It grieves me to say
B< They have learned with dismay ^
re We can't cure their vulva privitis!
Unusual verses like this crept into - Immortalia -. This is
one of the few in this anthology I have not heard repeated
at some time or other over the years.
in
of
ve
at
Y
YALE
Sc On the breast of a harlot from Yale
te She tatooed what she charged for her tail,
Tl For the good of the blind
th She had done on her behind
be The same price repeated in braille.
We get an idea of the price range as follows:
se
th There was a young fellow from Yale
at Who was exceedingly pale.
su He spent his vacation
of In self masturbation
th Because of the high price of tail.
20
Tl
of
d<
dj
or ZEST
The Dean undressed with pious zest
The Vicar's wife to lie on.
She thought it rude
To do it nude,
So he left his old school tie on.
143
TAILPIECE
I have stated that the definitive work on the limerick
is yet to be written. The sense of omission vies evenly with
the feeling that I have done everything humanly possible
to record the current manifestations and symbols of lim-
erology found among our people. Future sociologists try-
ing to reconcile the evidence of our abominable behavior
toward each other with our purely ritual and meaningless
avowalof the second commandment will find in this volume
a true expression of real and popular sentiments stupidly
omitted from most social histories.
I hope I have convinced you that man turns his instincts
into folkways. The limerick is one means he uses to pre-
serve them in our present so-called civilization. The verse
form is therefore truly as infinite as man's ingenuity, and
there are many more poems which shine in the diadem
of our culture:
B. A.
There was a Smith College B. A.
Who was posing this problem one day:
What result would there be
If C-U-N-T
Were divided by C-O-C-K?
A Yale PH. D. going by
Was persuaded to give it a try.
He worked the division
With perfect precision,
And found the answer was B-A-B-Y!
BLOOD
There was an old bastard named Blood
Made a fortune performing at stud.
His twenty inch peter
(A triple repeater)
Would come like the Biblical Flood!
144
BRENT
There was a young lady named Brent
With a cunt of enormous extent
It was so deep and so wide
You could go camping inside
Provided you brought your own tent.
CALCUTTA
There was a young man from Calcutta
Who practiced a curious trick.
He greased up his asshole with butter,
And therein he inserted his prick.
He adopted this measure so shady,
Not for pleasure, nor power, nor pelf,
But simply because a young lady
Had told him to go fuck himself.
CARTER
There was an old fellow named Carter
Who was truly a magnificent farter!
He could fart anything
From God Save the King
To Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
He could vary (with proper persuasion)
His fart to suit the occasion.
He could fart like a flute,
Like a lark or a lute,
Or the trump of the doomsday invasion!
CHICHESTER
There was a young lady of Chichester
Whose walk made statues in their nitches stir.
Her protruding breast
And the way that she dressed
Made the Bishop of Chichester's britches stir.
145
DOE
There was a family named Doe
An ideal family to know
As father screwed mother
She said, "You're heavier than brother,"
And he said, "Yes, Sis told me so!"
* DOVER
There was a young lady of Dover
Whose passion was such that it drove her
To cry, when you came,
"Oh dear! What a shame!
But now we can do it all over!"
DUNDEE
A Dutchman who dwelt in Dundee
Walked in to a grocer's named Lee.
He said, "If you blease
Haff you any prick cheese?"
Said the grocer, "I'll skin back and see."
GRACE
There was a young lady named
Who would not take a prick in
But though she'd not fuck it,
She'd kiss and she'd suck it,
And let it go off in her face.
JOCK
There was a young fellow named Jock
Who was blessed with a two headed cock.
When he'd fondle the thing
It would rise up and sing
An antiphonal chorus by Bach.
Grace
her 'place';
146
But whether Jock's cocks ever met
Has not been described us as yet.
But it would be diverting
To see him inserting
His dongs while they sang a duet!
KENT
A shiftless young fellow of Kent
Let his wife fuck the landlord for rent.
But as she grew older
The landlord got colder,
And now they camp out in a tent!
LOU
I once knew a harlot named Lou
And a versatile fuck she was too.
After ten years of whoredom
She would die of sheer boredom
If she married an old bastard like you!
MOBILE
There was a young girl from Mobile
Whose cunt was unable to feel.
To give her a thrill
Took a rotary drill
Or a Number 9 emery wheel.
namein;
A certain young shiek I'm not namein'
Asked a flapper he thought he was tamin\
"Have you your maidenhead?"
"Don't be foolish," she said,
"But I still have the box that it came in."
147
NANTUCKETT
A Sailor who hailed from Nantuckett
Took a dog to a thicket to fuck it.
Said the dog, "Man, I'm queer!
Get away from my rear!
Come around to the front and I'll suck it!"
NEWT
There was a young fellow named Newt
Who was troubled with warts on his root.
He put acid on these
And now when he pees
He must finger his root like a flute!
RANGOON
A widow who came from Rangoon
Hung a memorial wreath on her womb.
'To remind me," she said,
"Of my husband who's dead,
And of what put him into his tomb!"
There was a young man from Rangoon
Whose farts were never in tune.
When least you'd expect 'em
They'd burst from his rectum
With a roar like a broken bassoon.
SKINNER
There was an old fellow named Skinner
Whose prick, his wife said, had grown thinner.
But still by and large,
It would always discharge
Once he could just get it in her,
148
You ask, "Is there never an end?'
Truth is, you have simply reached the last page of the
record. Never forget that this book has no real ending. It
goes on and on as long as people are left on earth, and its
life and its importance will vary directly with "official"
intolerance of unsuppressible mores like:
WALES
There was a young sailor from Wales
Who was an expert at pissing in gales;
He could piss in a jar
From the top-gallant spar
Without wetting so much as the sails.
WAVERLY
There was a young man of Waverly
Adept at all manner of knavery
With lecherous howls
He sucked out the bowels
Of owls in underground aviaries.
ETC. ETC. ETC.
ETC. ETC.
149
[Note: this is a tipped in sheet printed on yellow paper]
ERRATA
Page 2, line 26, for religous read religious
" 3, " 33, " of " ofV
" 5, " 26, " you " You
" 6, " 2, " ,'
" 10, " 23, " Rimes " Rhymes
" 11, " 12, " year.s " years.
" 13, " 10, " Thermopylae. " Thermopylae."
" 14, " 33, " limerick " Limerick
" 15, " 2, " limerick " Limerick
" 18, " 33, " Capture " capture
" 33, " 11, " lake " Lake
" 33, " 16, " lake " Lake
" 41, " 15, " line " lines
" 41, " 15, " scdool " school
" 41, " 23, " lude " lewd
" 48, " 14, " 'bout' " 'bout
" 48, " 15, " its " it's
" 49, " 11, " Its " It's
" 51, " 20, " ljmerick " limerick
" 80, " 28, " curiosly " curiously
" 83, " 35, " alter " altar
" 94, " 3, " these " these
" 101, " 14, " elephant Woman " Elephant woman
" 111, " 29, " Uutil " Until
" 124, " 1, " prostitude " prostitute
" 126, " 24, " Cannaught " Connaught.
" 137, " 29, " vericose " varicose
" 147, " 24, " Namein' " Namin'
" 147, " 25, " namein' " namin'
" 156, " 28, " 149 " 148
INDEX
Abersquith ____________,,--------------------------- 54
Aberystwith (Ipswith) ______________________5, 54
Adam__________________________________ 37,54
Alaska (Lancaster) ________________._______ 55
Algiers (I am) (Siam) (Spain) (Liz) _______55,56,57
Alice (Bill)________________________________ 57
Anna (See Marine) ________________________ 113
Amoeba__________________________________ 58
Anheuser _________________________________ 58
Arden ___________________________„-________ 59
Arose____________________-________________ 31
Art ___________!_;_________________________. 23
Asia (Gaza)____________________________ 41,59
Australia __________________________________ 59
Azores _■_______________________i____________ 59
B.A. ______________________________________ 144
Banker____________________________________ 60
Baroda____________________________________ 60
Barking Creek (See Tunbridge Creek) _______ 138
Bates ____________________-____-_________-- 60
Bayruith __________________________________ 61
Beard _____________________________________ 38
Beecher___________________________________ 61
Beginning ______________________________.__ 46
Belgravia _____________-____-_______________ 61
Bengal ____________________________________ 62
Bermuda _____________________-__________ 41,63
Biarritz ______________._____________________ 26
Bill (See Alice) ____________________________ 57
Birmingham (Fool) ______________________ 63,64
Bister_____________________________________ 13
Blood ________-____________________________ 145
Bombay (See Racine, McLean) ____i________ 64
Boston______________________>_____________ 65
Bray _________________1___________________ 66
150
Brent___________________________-________ 66,145
Brest__________________________________ 20,67
Breeze (McBreeze) _________________________ 66
Brienz___________________________________~ 67
Bryde (Bride) (Clyde) ___________________ 35,68
Brighton __________________________________ 69
Buckingham ___________________________— 39,69
Cadits____________________________________ 70
Calcutta._______________________________ 70,145
Canny ____________________________________ 42
Cape _____________________________________ 71
Cape Cod _______________________________- 72
Cape Horn ________________________________ 93
Carr ______________________________________ 72
Carter ____________________________________ 145
Cary ___________________________________ 46,72
Cashmere __________________________________ 24
Cass _____________________________________ 73
Cawnpore_________________________________ 73
Celesia (See Silesia)______________________, 135
Charteris ___________.______________________ 74
Cheadle__________________________________ 25
Chester (See Ester) _________________________ 26
Chichester_________________________________ 146
China (Medina)____________________________ 75
Clyde (See France)___________________.____ 90
Coast _________________.___________________ 75
Como _____________________________________ 76
Connaught________________________________ 126
Corfu _____________________________________.4,77
Costanza _________-________________________ 77
Cremorne _________________________________ 24
Critter (See Pelican) ._..___________.___________ 124
Croft ______________,_______________________ 77
Datchet ._____;_____________________________„ 78
Dave _____._______________________________ 78
Deal ____._________________________________ 78
Decatur___________________________________ 78
151
Dee _______-______________________________ 80
Delkeith _„_______-________________________ 26
Delray ____________-_________:____—._;. 80
Detroit __________:___________:___-__„_'__— ___—.' 80
Devizes (Vinsizes) ._____________-------______ 81
, Devon ___________-________________________ 81
Diddy ______________________________--_-- 8
Dirkin (Perkin) ___________________________________ 82
Diss (Miss)____________________________--_- 36
Dock _____________________________________ 8
Doe ___:____________________________________ 146
Dot (Grott) (Wales) (Marseilles)______________ 82
Dover_________________________________,___ 146
Downditch (See Goditch) ___________________ 91
Drunk____________________________________ 25
Duluth _____________________________:____._______:_____ 83
Dundee (See Leigh) ___________ 12,17,84,106,146
Dunn________________________________-___- 84
Ealing (Wheeling) _________________— 45,85
Ecuador (Tagore) (Florida)_____________________ 86
Eden ________;_________:..-l__«i-_""'''" 16
Eltham__________________________________- 23
Eno________---_________________________- 86
;Ester (Hester) _________„_____________________________.._: 87
Eva _____-___________-_________________l- 87
Exeter ..._____________________,_____________ 88
Fashion_______________________„1__________ 5,89f
Flea______________________________________ 89
Florida (See Ecuador)_____________________. 86
Flue __________________________________._.___„ 30
Flute_________________________„____________ 43
Fool (See Birmingham) _____________________ 63
France (Penzance) (Clyde)__________________ 89
Futter (to)_________________________.____„ 44,90
Gaza_____________________________________ 22
Gloucester_____________________________1___ 91
Goditch (Downditch) _____.________________„ 81
Going By (see B.A.)____T.______.____________ 144
Goring ____.---------------------------------------------- 25
152
Gown ________________—-—-------------------— 16
Grace _____________________________________ 146
Grant _______________:.__________________.....- 91
Grasty____________________________-—------- 91
Greece____________________________________ 92
Greenwich ________________________________ 92
Groom ________________________------------------ 92
Grouch____________________.m-___-_________- 92
Grott (See Dot) ____________________________ 83
Hall___________________________________ 93
Harem ___________________-_____________ 93,132
Harwich___________________________________ 25
Hester (See Ester) __________________________ 87
Hitchin (See Litchen) .______________________ 107
Horn ,___________.__________________________ 93
Howells ___________________________________ 94
Hub ______________________________________ 94
Hughes ____,___________________-_---------____ 94
I am (See Algiers) ______________________ 55,56
Iraq (Rio)_________________________________ 95
Ipswich___________________________________ 95
Ipswith (Se£ Aberystwith) __________________ 54
Japotn (See Saki) _______________________;___ 133
Jock ----------------------------- 147
Johns--------------------------------.----------_------- 18,96
Joppa -------------------------------------- 29
Josyl ------------------------------------ 96
Kelly -------------------------------jl---------------____ 98
Kent---------------------------------------------------___ 98,147
Kentucky__________________________________ 98
Kew .__--------------------------------- 12,98
Khartoum ___________—______________________ 20
Khief_____________________________________ 99
Kilbride (See McBride)______________________ H4
Kildare (Montclair) ________________________ 100
Kilkenny__________________________________ 102
Kings ------------------------------------------- 19,37,38,102
King^ Cross ________________________„______ 24
Klepper___________________________________ 102
153
Lancaster -.(See... Alaska) _______-____________ 55
{upland ______-___--------------------—--------—----o 103
Lay (to) ________----________-___-______• 103
Le Hay (Bombay) _______________________~- 64
Lee (Tea) (Skinner)_________________________ 103
Leeds _________-_______________________~~~^ 105
Leigh (Dundee) ____________—_____________- 105
Loch Leven _____________________________4-: 106
Lewellyn ——-___________-____________:____,_ 107
Litchen, ,_r____r„_____r__.__r_rr_________.___.._„________ 107
Li?.;: (See Algiers) 7___________________________,: 57
Lou' __:.-__-_____________________________-.„. v 147
Louth (Thrace) _________________________. 107^108
Louvies____________________________________; * 108
Lucknow________________________.____—___ 24
Lugger_______________-_____,_______________27,109
tundy ___...________________________________ 23
Lynn (Wynn) (Min)________________________ 109
M:£.. --_______________-___________ 36
Madras __.________---------------------------------- 31,111
Madrid_________---_____________________-, 111
Maine _.._____________..._____________________J 112
Make (to) __._._._________________—d._______ 112
Marine_________________________________ 29,112
Marseilles. (See Dot)_______________________ 82
Maud_____________________________________.114
May ___________________.---------------------------- 114
McBreeze (See Breeze) ________________._____ 66
McBride (Kilbride) _________________________ 114
McClean (See Racine, Bombay)_________ 64,128
Medina (See China) _______________________ 75
Min (S£e Lynn) ________•___________________._ 109
Miss ______.---------------------------------------43,37,115 •
Mobile_______________________—______;_:_________ 147
Molly ________________„______________L:__„ 115
Montclair (See Kildare) ____________________ 100
Montezuma________________________________ 116
Montrose _______.__________________________ 116
154
Montvaile __________________________-______ 141
Mountain _________________________________ 23
Myrtle____________________________________ 116 .
Namin' _________________-_________________ 148
Nant ....._____J_______________________________ 22
Nantuckett (Tucket) _____________________117,148
Nashville, Tenn.__________1_______________ 117
Natal_____________________________________ 118
Natchez ___________________________________ 118
Nation ____________________________________ 22
Nativity___________________________________ 119
Newcastle _______________________:_________ 119
Newminster Court __________________________ 120
Newt .......____'._______________________________ 148
Newton ___________________________________ 43
Niger (Riga)._______________________________ 16
Norton ____________________________________ 26
Ohio _____________________________________ 121
Ostend _____________.______________________ 121
Oz (ounce) (See Kildare) ___________________ 101
Pat _____._________________________________ 122
Paul _________________________________-_„-„ 122
Pearse ____________________________________ 123
Pelican (Critter) „______________________ _ 124
Penzance (See France) __________________ 90,141
Perkin (See Dirkin) ________________________. 82
Persuasion (see Carter) ____________________ 145
Peru _......______-__________________________124,125
Phidias .___'_________________________________ 130
Picture-Palaces ____________________________ 125
Piss (to) ___________________________________ 125
Pitlochery__________________________________ 126
Plains ____________________________________ 126
Poole ________________.____________________ 127
Priest_____________________________________ 127
Quebec ___________________________________ 19
Racine (McCIean) (Bombay) _____________ 64,128
Rangoon ____________:__________________ 25,148
155
Ransom ___________—~/------------------------------------ 128
Rex-___________________________------------------ 129
Rheims _______------------------------------------- 23,129
Riga (See Niger) ___________________________ 16
Rio (See Iraq) _______-_____________________ 95
Robles _________--______________--------------, 129
Rolled ______-______________________:---------- 27
Roue _______--------------------------------------------- 129
Rose Madder _______-________________---------- 130
Rosetti _________-_________________________ 130
St. Bees ___________________________________ 17
St. Clair ____._____________________________ 131
St. Giles__________________________________ 131
St. Kitts _____________________________-_____ 10
St. Pauls _____________._________,_______ 132
St. Louis _______.____________________________ 132
St. Stevens __________________________:_____ 12
Saki (Japan) _____________________________..__ 133
Sark ________________________________-------- 22
Samoa _______________________-----------------.___ 133
Santander (Toulouse) ______________________ 133
Scott „________________________;____________ 134
Sea _______________-___________________ 40,134
Siam (See Algiers) ________________________55,56
Siberia ._________________________________ 45,135
Silesia (Celesia) _________________,________ 44,135
Sioux _________________-------_______________ 41,42
Skinner (Tupper, Tate, Lee) ____ 35,103,136,149
Slough________________.___________________ 136
Sochipper_________________________________ 137
Southall (See Bengal) _______.______________ 63
Spain (See Algiers)________________________ 56
Spitzbergen_____________________________ 32,137
Stamboul_________________________________ 137
Star-------_■-----------------------------._____________ 19
Stein --------------------------------------------1_______ 58
Surat (See Pat)____________________________ 122
Surmise_____________._____________________ 46
156
Tagore (See Ecuador) ._________.____________ 86
Tantivy __________________________________- 22
Tate (See Skinner)_________________________ 136
Tea (See Lee) _____________________________ 103
Terminus _______________.___________________ 5
Tess (See Dee) _______________„___________ 80
Thermopylae______________________________ 13
Thrace (See Louth) _____________ ______, 1C7,1C8
Tobago ___________________________________ 11
Tooting___________________________________ 23
Toulouse (See Santander)__________________ 133
Thun _____________________________________ 138
Tree „__„___________________________._______ 17
Troy ._____________________________________ 22
Tucker (See Cape Cod)_____________________ 72
Tunbridge Creek (Barking Creek) ___________ 138
Tupper (See Skinner) ______________________ 136
Turk ______________________________________ 138
Twickenham______________________________ 139
Venice ____________________________________ 140
Vinsizes (See Devizes) 1____________________ 81
Virgin ____________________________________ 137
Vistula ____________________________________ 24
Wac _______-_______________.______________ 140
Wales (See Corfu, Dot, Grott, Marseilles) -140,149
Wantage__________________________________ 141
Waverly ______________.___________________ 149
Wemyss (See Worcester) ___________________ 42
Wheeling (See Ealing) __________________ 45,85
White (Wight)_____________________________ 141
Wilde (Wylde)____________________________ 142
Wood Green (See Racine) _________________64,128
Worcester _________________________________ 142
Write us (they)____________________________ 143
Wynn (See Lynn) __________________________ 110
Yale ______________________________________ 143
Yacht (See Scott) __________________________ 134
Zest (See Brest) _.__________________________ 6,143
157
