Are Limericks Really From Limerick?
My mom asked me the other day whether limericks (the humorous poems) are connected to Limerick (the city and county in Ireland). Thinking that I am full of random Irish information, she assumed I knew the answer but I had no idea. This brings me to this morning’s post dedicated to the nonsensical poetry called limericks and where the literary form originated.
Let me first refresh your memory in case you can’t remember what a limerick is (hey, I couldn’t exactly recall either). Think five verses with the 1st, 2nd, and 5th lines and the 3rd and 4th lines rhyming respectively. Lines 1, 2, and 5 usually have eight or nine syllables and lines 3 and 4 are shorter with around five or six syllables. Limericks are written about a wide variety of topics and are generally silly and comical in tone and can even be a bit obscene.
The origin of the limerick is totally muddled. What we do know is that limericks started to surface in the 1800s but no one knows how they were formed or where they came from. There’s not even specific proof of a connection to Limerick, the place; however, based on the name, most people are under the impression (and frankly this makes the most sense) that limericks are connected to Limerick. It’s also been suggested that limericks could have possibly come from an old Irish soldiers’ song, “Will You Come Up to Limerick?” A funny parlor game was created where senseless phrases were added as lines to the song’s title to create a unique rhyme. Whatever the case, it seems there’s an obvious link between limericks and Limerick even if no one knows the actual truth.
We can thank Edward Lear, the English artist and poet, for popularizing limericks even if we don’t know where exactly they came from. Lear helped the poems become a favourite through his famous children’s book of poems called A Book of Nonsense. This book, which was published in 1846, included around 70 limericks and really put them on the map. With that, I shall end with a limerick from the great Lear:
There was a young lady of Wilts,
Who walked up to Scotland on stilts;
When they said it is shocking
To show so much stocking,
She answered, “Then what about kilts?”
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[...] probably from the city even though there’s no definitive proof. If you want to learn more, click here for the article.) What we want you all to do is create and submit a limerick (see important rule [...]
limericks in gaelic go back much further, the maigue poets around adare co limerick were the ones who used this format but as they did not use english they are ignored
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