Rules:

• Limericks can be submitted in text, photo, or video format. Creativity is encouraged!
• Brush Square Museums staff and Brush Square Museums Foundation members are not eligible to win prizes.
• Limericks should relate to Austin or Texas in some way–could write about an experience, a place, a person/people, etc.
• All submissions must be family friendly (no profanity, nudity, or graphic descriptions of illegal or inappropriate situations).
• Two categories are available: General (13 & up) and Youth (12 & under). Participants under the age of 18 must have parental consent to enter.
• By entering, I consent to my submission being published on Brush Square Museums' website or social media, if selected.

How to Write a Limerick!

So you want to write a limerick? The best thing to do is read as many as possible, though we at the museum cannot take responsibility for any health conditions this may cause, up to and including headaches, nausea, despair, hysterical blindness, and/or violent convulsions. Limericks are best nibbled daintily, one or two at a time, rather than recklessly guzzled.

Basically, a limerick is a five line poem with an AABBA rhyme scheme, and a rhythm based on the poetic foot called the anapest, a pattern of rhythm of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. (Confusingly, the word “anapest” isn’t one–if it were, it would be pronounced “an-a-PEST” instead of “AN-a-pest.”) Blame the Greeks, I suppose. Although rhymes are important, what really holds the limerick together is its rhythm. The basic rhythm is a mixture of stressed and unstressed syllables:

da da DAH da da DAH da da DAH

da da DAH da da DAH da da DAH

da da DAH da da DAH

da da DAH da da DAH

da da DAH da da DAH da da DAH

Stressed out about stresses?

Well, for example, in the word example, you put the emphasis on the middle syllable : ex-AM-ple

Or, “syllable”:

SYLL-a-ble

In a limerick, the first, second, and fifth lines contain three stresses (anapestic trimeter) and the third and fourth lines have two (anapestic dimeter). 

Make sense? If not, check out this excellent how-to page from the Saturday Evening Post, whose popular limerick competition, “Limerick Laughs,” has been going since 1992: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/04/writing-limericks-history/ 

So where does it come from? 

History of the Limerick!

Well, the short answer is no one knows for sure!

Or you could blame St. Thomas Aquinas. Though calling it a limerick might be a bit of a stretch, one of the first five-line poems with this rhyme scheme comes from the works of this Italian theologian, a prayer of thanksgiving for priests after delivering Mass. Composed in the 13th century, It was proposed as an early ancestor of the form by priest and limerick enthusiast Mgsr. Ronald A. Knox in 1925:

“Sit vitiorum meorum evacuatio

Concupiscentae et libidinis exterminatio,

Caritatis et patientiae,

Humilitatis et obedientiae,

Omniumque virtutum augmentatio.”

(Translation: Let it be for the elimination of my sins and for the removal of my desire and longing, for the growth of charity and patience, humility and obedience, and also of all virtue.)

Rousing stuff, isn’t it? 

Though writers, including Shakespeare and George Herbert, continued to compose what some enthusiasts of the form call “pre-limericks,” things quieted down until the 18th century, when a circle of Irish-language poets in Croom, a town in county Limerick, started meeting in a hill-fort and composing verse satires about each other. They called themselves “The Maigue Poets” after the Maigue River, and James Clarence Mangan’s published translations in the 1840s made their work known to the English speaking world.

This makes the 1840s quite a watershed. Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, published in 1846, became an enormous hit, with many versions of these poems that are still read today. His poems were written for children and took a whimsical view of animals and people. Lear’s verses were clean. There have been some suggestions to call “clean” limericks “Learics” in his honor. He didn’t use the term “limerick,” though.

According to historian Matthew Potter, whose impeccable credentials include being both a historian of the limerick and of the actual city of Limerick, the earliest known use of the word “limerick” in print to refer to a short, humorous poem dates from 1889, when the host of a party in a novel forbids his guests from reciting limericks. Around this time, people began composing verses to the tune of “Will You Come up to Limerick?” of varying stages of bawdiness. By the 1890s, even Rudyard Kipling was in on the action, referring to limericks in a letter to his editors in 1895.

Its association with obscenity was already established. The Irish Times suggests that the use of the word “limerick” is a conspiracy by the English to pin dirty poems on the Irish. Around 1900, Punch magazine abandoned its first limerick contest because the entries they received were too obscene.

Sources:

http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/limerick/stthomas.html

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/04/writing-limericks-history/

https://oldmooresalmanac.com/a-history-of-everyones-favourite-poem-the-limerick/

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-1.962815

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/is-the-limerick-a-limerick-invention-1.3196974 

https://www.britannica.com/art/limerick-poetic-form