On Limericks Limericks are poems like haiku , a short pithy form, but unlike haiku, the rhythm is more flexible, and they are often amusing, scurrilous, ribald, or even downright obscene. In fact, as it’s a common, low culture form, there are no rules that can’t be broken so long as you stick to metre and rhyme, more or less. You don’t have to begin on the downstroke, the first beat of the bar, so to speak. You can add syllables, so long as you keep the main rhythm intact. The second word in this limerick is the first stress. A man called Car niv orous Keith Ate a di et of chick en and beef He washed in warm ham Dressed in roast lamb And used tur key to white n his teeth The rhyme scheme is almost always A, A, B, B, A - but that can also be flexible to some extent. It’s traditional to end with a punchline , but the subject doesn’t have to be comic. This one opens in the middle of a musical narrative: So Johnny said “Bonn
