I’m going to use this one as an example:
In a shower of shimmering lights
She descends from the heavenly heights
So angelic, so pure
Such a dazzling allure
But there’s quite a big hole in her tights
The number of syllables is 9-9-6-6-9, and the rhyming scheme is AABBA, which simply means all the ‘A lines’ (first line, second line, last line) rhyme, and all the ‘B lines’ (third and fourth lines) rhyme.
When I was writing sonnets I regularly woke up thinking in lines of 10 syllables! Now I’m in the middle of my ‘limerick affliction’ it’s down to 9 and 6, with a completely different rhythm. The most mundane things will suddenly pop into my head:
When I look at the carrier bag
There’s a photograph there of a dog
See the battery left on the floor
What’s the time, am I ready to eat?
That was just after a quick look around the room. If I move over to haiku at some point it will no doubt change again. With haiku, I used to regularly count every syllable (5-7-5) on my fingers, but the rhythm of a limerick is easy to ‘do’ in my head:
In the mountains of deepest Nepal
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
Although sometimes the longer lines have 10 beats, which goes:
There's a mountain range up in Kentucky
da-da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da DAH-da
These variations are the ones I'm most comfortable with, but the ‘standard’ limerick is this:
There was an old man from Nantucket
da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da DAH-da
Or:
There was an old lady from Rome
da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da-DAH
You Need to Metre
The most important thing to remember is not the rhyme, which is easy (if it rhymes you know it), and not even the number of syllables (which you can count). No, it’s the metre, always the metre. That’s really the rhythm of the poem, and comes from the pattern of syllables, which can be short or long, stressed or unstressed. If you get that wrong, a limerick, or in fact any poem, won’t trip off the tongue – instead, it will walk into a wall!In my examples above, ‘da’ is unstressed, ‘DAH’ is stressed. The simple way to remember it is to imagine the actual words are capitalised:
In the mountains of deepest Nepal
da-da-DAH da-da-DAH da-da-DAH
In the MOUNTtains of DEEPest NePAL
‘Mountain’ works there, as do ‘deepest’ and ‘Nepal’, because they are 2-syllable words with stresses where I’ve shown them. If you replace those words with 2-syllable words where the stresses are in different places you’ll see the rhythm is immediately lost:
In the lagoons of serene Venice
Same number of syllables, but those words do not work at all. You cannot read that in this way:
In the LAGoons of SERene VenICE
The words are actually stressed as follows:
In the lagOONS of serENE VENice
And that simply won’t work for a limerick. That really is all you need to remember about the form of the limerick. Get the rhyme and the rhythm working and you’re halfway there.
What About the Story?
Halfway? The other half is of course the story you want to tell. I can’t give you much advice about that because the weird (dis)connections in my brain are what lead me to my finished poems. But I can tell you one of the ways I will create a limerick, using the example I showed earlier:In a shower of shimmering lights
She descends from the heavenly heights
So angelic, so pure
Such a dazzling allure
But there’s quite a big hole in her tights
The way I create most of my limericks is this: I think of a first line, which gives me a general idea of the subject, then I think of a ridiculous last line, and lastly I fill in everything between.
To get my first line I often go to the ‘Daily Deviations’ or ‘Undiscovered’ sections of DeviantArt and just browse around, waiting for something to catch my eye. Or I may generate some random words. If no idea presents itself, I go to the next image or word list. Eventually something will happen. The spark of an idea will form, and that will give me my first line:
In a shower of shimmering lights
That was, as I remember, a picture of a beautiful woman surrounded by (you guessed it) shimmering lights. So now I’m writing about a woman (who later becomes an angel), who is beautiful and glamorous. In a limerick the last line will reverse all that, drop the glamour and add a punchline.
I don’t know what’s going to fit there, but I do know I need a rhyme for ‘lights’, so I look for that in the rhyming dictionary whose praises I endlessly sing – Rhymezone:
http://www.rhymezone.com
There are plenty of rhyming words for ‘lights’, but the page highlights the most common ones, which is where I usually look first:
bites, cites, heights, nights, rights, sights, sites, tights, whites
What immediately strikes me is ‘tights’. She’s a glamorous woman, but she has a hole in her tights. It’s as simple as that. I have a last line, the punchline to the scene:
But there’s quite a big hole in her tights
Now it’s just a case of writing 3 more lines to build her up, up, up, so that the verbal pratfall at the end leaps out at you.
Hitting the Rhymezone Hard
‘Heights’ is another rhyme, so I thought of ‘heavenly heights’. Maybe this is now an angel:She descends from the heavenly heights
Here’s another thing I do when I’m writing poetry: I think of the end of the line before I know what I’m doing with the beginning, so I write it down before I forget it. So with that line I might have thought ‘heavenly heights fits’ and I want her to, er, fall down? Doesn’t fit... no other ideas... let’s just get the end of the line in and worry about the start of it later:
She xxx the heavenly heights
Every x marks a syllable I need to fill. I also know the rhyme scheme is making me put da-DAH-da there.
My choice of words is dictated by the metre (see above), and yes, Rhymezone does let you display only words which fit the metre you need! I might want a 3-syllable word with the metre da-da-DAH, and I can find it. If it was DAH-da-da, or da-DAH-da (as here), that’s also possible. For rhyming poetry with metre, which is what I write, this is a priceless tool.
I initially though of ‘fall’ so I can put that in to find a synonym or related word, with 3 syllables, restricted to x/x (Rhymezone’s equivalent of da-DAH-da). I still don’t find one. But am I looking for one word, or do I need two? Does she fall from the heavenly heights? Small change:
She xx from the heavenly heights
I could use ‘falls down’ here and it would fit. But if there’s a single word, a better word, I’d rather use it. I need a 2-syllable word for ‘fall’, with a metre of ‘da-DAH’. I put that in, and high on the list is ‘descend’. Perfect:
She descends from the heavenly heights
Just the ‘short lines in the middle’ to go. The method is the same. I’m describing a beautiful angel, so at some point I found ‘pure’ and ‘allure’. To get there I might have put a few different words into the Rhymezone search, found their synonyms, and eventually discovered a couple of words which rhyme and which appeal to me (all very subjective). Here are the completed lines:
So angelic, so pure
Such a dazzling allure
I often think of a word but know it’s boring, so the synonym lookup is useful for that. If I thought of ‘shiny’ I could then find ‘dazzling’, which is a far better word here.
I do want to emphasise that if a word looks like it isn’t good enough (too bland, perhaps), there are probably many other words which can be used instead. Synonyms, related words, rhymes which lead to a different meaning altogether, are all part of the process. If you change the word at the end of the line, of course, you are going to need to make sure your rhymes are all intact.
I should also mention alliteration, which for any humorous poem is something you cannot ignore. That is, two or more words, side by side, beginning with the same letter/sound. Decide which one is better:
Shower of shimmering lights
Shower of glittering lights
I hope you picked the first one. Similarly ‘heavenly heights’ is alliterative. It’s pleasing to the senses when you recite it. Why? It just is. Don’t question the magic!
So, with those 3 additional lines, it’s done. That’s the whole limerick. Here it is once more:
In a shower of shimmering lights
She descends from the heavenly heights
So angelic, so pure
Such a dazzling allure
But there’s quite a big hole in her tights
Conclusion
Straightforward? I like to think so. I’ve gone to great lengths to describe things in detail, but basically you just need to make your poem rhyme, make it fit the metre, and make it fun. It can be a time-consuming process, and sometimes it’s not easy to produce something you’re happy with, but as with many things, the work you put in makes the end result all the more satisfying.So let me try one more, completely improvised for this journal:
If a limerick you will be writing
Try to make it sound really exciting
If you can’t tell a tale
And you think you may fail
Add a rude little word or some fighting
That took me 2 minutes from start to finish... perhaps it shows!
Remember that you can use these same guidelines for writing any other poetic form, so long as it has metre and rhyme.
Good luck!
