"How did Limerick become synonymous with the most popular form of poetry in the English language?" Frank McNally, the regular Diarist, asked recently, writes Paul Hurley.
Some say the five-line verse-form goes back to Aristophanes, the 4th-century BC Greek comic poet, but most authorities believe it got its name from Limerick. They claim it was brought there from France as a barrack-room ballad by returned veterans of the Irish Brigade.
The form was used in Irish by the 18th-century Maigue poets Aindrias MacCraith and Sean O'Tuama, who held court at O'Tuama's tavern in Croom on the River Maigue in Co Limerick. James Clarence Mangan translated one of their limericks:
I sell the best brandy and sherry
To make good customers merry;
But at times their finances
Run short, as it chances,
And then I feel very sad, very.
During the 1970 Maigue Festival in the poets' honour, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich unveiled a monument to MacCraith over his grave in Kilmallock and the Church of Ireland Bishop Wyse Jackson of Limerick won the festival's prize for the best limerick with this one:
A landlord from Maigueside,
O'Toomey,
Hated verses longwinded
and gloomy;
On the limerick he hit
For its scarifying wit,
In a setting sufficiently roomy.
Langford Reed, an English authority on the five-liner, was probably right, then, in having no doubt about its origin:
All hail to the county of Limerick,
Which provides a cognomen,
generic,
For a species of verse
Which for better or worse,
Is supported by layman
and cleric.
The word limerick didn't officially enter the English language until 1989, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, whose founder Sir James Murray defined it, unfairly, as an indecent nonsense verse. Some limericks are indeed so, but as the American poet Donald Marquis says:
It needn't have ribaldry's taint
Or strive to make anyone faint.
There's a type that's demure
And perfectly pure,
Though it helps quite a lot
if it ain't.
But while snobbish people may still look down on the lowly little limerick - though Tennyson, Stevenson and Eliot are among those who wrote some - it survives because it is easily remembered. The whimsical writer Edward Lear published 72 of them in his Book of Nonsense. One English literary critic recently stated that "a successful limericker must be regarded as a better poet than many writers of modern free verse".
This normally frivolous form of verse can also be quite high-minded sometimes. Take, for instance, Mgr Ronald Knox's famous one about Bishop Berkeley's theory that things exist only when seen:
There once was a man who said,
"God must think it exceedingly odd
If He finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
Good limericks certainly need not be naughty. The American Society of SS Peter and Paul published a Limerick Prayer Book, whose preface states:
These rhymes were designed by a priest,
To affect your religion like yeast;
If they help it to grow,
Like the yeast in the dough,
There'll be one better Christian at least.
There are even limericks "designed" by an English bishop, the late Dr Bernard Wall, who frankly admitted his addiction:
The limerick's inferior, they say,
To the poetry of Shelley or Gray;
But the Bishop of X,
Without wishing to vex,
Composes at least one a day.
He continued doing so while attending the Second Vatican Council, during which he wrote many like this one on married priests:
They want us to alter our lives
And share our good fortune with wives,
With youngsters and bills,
And scandals and pills,
And mothers-in-law round our dives.
And speaking of pills, he had no doubt about Humanae Vitae:
Some moralists claim that
the Pill
May be used even though you're not ill.
It gives the ability
To banish fertility;
But I don't believe it's God's will.
He was even tempted to pen some versions about virgins, though one wonders what sublime theological topic was being discussed at the Council while he wrote:
A glamorous young lady named Tere
Used to wear mistletoe in her beret.
She considered a kiss
Was nothing amiss,
But anything more was. . .very.
Stanley Sharpless was another expert limericker. Among his vast output is this gem:
There was a young lady. . .tut, tut!
So you think that you're in for
some smut?
Some five-line crescendo
Of lewd innuendo?
Well, you're wrong. This is anything but.
Sharpless also summarised Shakespeare's masterpiece:
Prince Hamlet thought uncle a traitor
For having it off with his Mater;
Revenge Dad or not
-That's the gist of the plot.
And he did - nine soliloquies later.
Some of the most difficult of all limericks, tongue-twisting ones, were written by the American poetess Carolyn Wells, who gave us:
A canner, exceedingly canny,
One morning remarked to his granny:
"A canner can can
Anything that he can,
But a canner can't can a can,
can he?"
Another lady, Barbara Reeve, recently won a London Times prize for this sporting limerick with a humorous twist in its tail:
A young tennis player called Bobo
At Wimbledon had a good gogo.
When asked how he came
By such a nickname,
He said, "You try rhyming with Zivojinovic."
Let us end on a more serious note with Frank McManus's prayer:
Precede us, O Lord, with Thy Grace,
As we travel through Time and through Space;
In all that we do,
May we magnify You,
Our reward as we run the straight race.