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May 12 is National Limerick Day, so chosen to honor English artist, musician, and writer Edward Lear (1812-1888, and the youngest, btw, of 21 children), who, if not the inventor of the form, is commonly held to have popularized it. While the limerick usually has five lines, Lear often fused the third and fourth together:
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."
Arguably, his most famous poem, though not a limerick, was The Owl and the Pussycat.
One of the better limerick writers, imho, was Ogden Nash. Here's one of his more famous attempts:
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, "Let us flee!"
"Let us fly!" said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
My favorite, though often attributed to Nash, was written by Dixon Lanier Merritt:
A wonderful bird is the pelican.
His bill can hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week,
But I'm damned if I see how the helican!
Here's a list of more limericks: http://www.poemhunter.com/poems/limerick/page-/22573720/
The form, of course, is named after the Irish town of Limerick, where, apparently, the style gained popularity. As most of us know, this kind of poem lends itself very well to bawdy compositions. In fact, there is an anonymously written (or maybe by Roger Gordon?) limerick about that very connection:
The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
Some more information and some ideas on how to celebrate the day: http://www.ehow.com/how_2329699_celebrate-limerick-day.html
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