The Mind Creative
Origin and structure of the limerick
The form of poetry that is wide known as the limerick possibly
originated in France during the Middle Ages, and then went across
to England.
An 11th century manuscript demonstrates the limerick’s rhythm
and pulse:
The lion is wondrous strong
And full of the wiles of wo;
And whether he pleye
Or take his preye
He cannot do but slo
* Here the word slo is equivalent to the word slay
The limerick consists of five lines with tri-meter (three-beat)
measures in the first, second, and fifth lines and di-meter
(two-beat) measures in the second and fourth. The rhyme can
be broadly defined as abccb.
After nearly five centuries, the limerick surfaced in William
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Othello and King Lear. However, it
was only in the early 1700's that the Limerick arrived in Ireland
(brought there by the soldiers returning from the continent-wide
War of the Spanish Succession). In 1776, it appeared in published
form in the book Mother Goose’s Melodies. After two decades,
when the Mother Goose nursery rhymes attained fame, the
limerick was forever affixed to children’s literature. During that
period, a group of local Irish poets composed limericks during
drinking sessions at various pubs. In fact, rumour has it, that a
pub in Limerick was noted for its pub crawl chorus, "Will you
please come up to Limerick?"
Gershon Legman, an expert on the limerick, believed that the
true limerick as a folk form is always obscene and described the
clean limerick as a "periodic fad and object of magazine contests,
rarely rising above mediocrity." From a folkloric point of view,
crossing the lines of taboo was an essential part of this form of
poetry.
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