Newsmen who covered the war in Africa will chuckle reminiscently at being reminded of a scurrilous stanza about a girl from Bengasi, who would associate with practically anybody except Frank GervaBi, U. Like jokes, limericks may acquire wide, if fleeting, popularity because they deal aptly with some topic in the moment’s eye.
The petals revealed What they should have concealed And the dance-as a dance was a failure. There was a young girl from Australia Who dressed for a dance as a dahlia Of the limericks built upon a gay conceit, my favorite is the anonymous Of the many fine limericks collected in “The Complete Limerick Book” of Langford Reed, that indefatigable researcher into the origins of the form, perhaps the best known is this punning one: An oft-quoted verse of the first sort is: Modern limericks usually depend for their impact on the humble pun, or the witty phrasing of an amusing conceit. Who kept two tame sheep in his room “For,” he said, “they remind me Of one left behind me, Knox has observed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that a “good limerick should have the conversational fluency of conversational prose,” and offers as an illustration: Įarly limericks like many of Edward Lear’s were nonsensical, but the recent trend is toward sharper point, such as the masterpiece of the British poet Anthony Euwer that President Wilson quoted so often he was widely credited with composing it:īut my face, I don’t mind it For I am behind it.Į. Mark Twain said: “Delicacy-a sad, sad falseĭelicacy-robs literature of the best two things among its belongings: family-circle narrative and obscene stories.” So there can be no mention here of the ladies from Thrace, Chichester, Madras, Exeter, Detroit of the men, young and old, from Sparta, Iraq, Cape Horn, Kent of the erring prelates from Algeria, Dundee, Devon, Birmingham. The lim’rick packs laughs anatomical Into space that is quite economical īut the good ones I’ve seen Are so seldom clean,Īnd the clean ones are so seldom comical. Most fanciers agree with Basil Davenport who wrote that: Here, of course, I will deal only with clean limericks-which is much like discoursing upon Shakespeare without mentioning Falstaff. A bibliophile’s prize, to cite one example, is Norman Douglas’ anthology it has footnotes of fantastic erudition. Several authors have collected and annotated the best of these, and had them privately printed. Scholarly consideration has also been given to the bawdier limericks which, like ballads and folk tales, are necessarily handed down verbally. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher Called a hen a most elegant creature, One of the printable byproducts of genius of Oliver Wendell Holmes: Great intellects have found the five-line verse form sufficiently challenging to spend hours packing into it a pun, quip, conceit, or grotesquerie of human behavior. A topical story dies with the topic-how many jokes about the Model T Ford do you remember? But limericks-like old soldiers-never die.Įverybody who speaks English knows a limerick or two, and practically everybody has tried making them: to win a prize in a contest, to lampoon a friend, to entertain a party, or simply to exercise the mind. Tonight, you guffaw at the radio comedian’s gag tomorrow, you gag. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap.Some say that she came from Moncton, Toronto, Moose Jaw or Saint John, But the rhymers abducted her, Slew, chased or instructed her All the way from Oxbow to Brampton Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again.
They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. „The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying.
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