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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
