Poetry full of angst

Limerick subreddit challenge

This week’s limerick challenge on the /rlimericks subreddit was to rhyme the word ‘angst’. This is a particularly tricky word to rhyme, since there aren’t ant English words that rhyme with it. It turns out there are precious few non-compound German words that rhyme.

It is the nature of the German language that compound words are common, so words such as ‘Flugangst’ (fear of flying), ‘Zukunsftangst’ (fear of the future) and ‘Flauschigeskätzchenangst’ (fear of fluffy kittens) are legitimate, but I think it’s cheating. A bit like rhyming ‘masses’ with ‘masses‘.

The middle section

Because I couldn’t think of many words, even in German, that would rhyme with angst, I opted to put the word in the middle section. One of the few words that does rhyme is ‘sangst’, a past tense of ‘sing’. So we would have a limerick about singing.

The middle section, with translation, becomes:

Warum hast du angst?
(Why are you afraid?)
Das Wort, das du sangst
(That word that you sang)

So we might have a German or Austrian choirmaster trying to mollify a singer who is scared of a word. And it also looks like I’m doing a bilingual limerick¹.

But why would someone be afraid of a word? Maybe the word ‘fahrt’ (meaning travel, journey or ride) was in the song. One translation of The Beatles line ‘She’s got a ticket to ride’ is ‘Sie hat ein Ticket für die Fahrt’. Sensitive creature that I am, I would likely be afraid of uttering such a rude word.

Three more lines to rhyme

Since ‘fahrt’ can mean ‘ride’. This gives me a selection of English words to use at the end of the three longer lines. The word ‘sighed’ was one of the first to come to mind, so the choirmaster sighed before he slipped into German for two lines.

However, limerick tradition – which I sometimes conform to – demands that a place is named at the end of the first line. How many well-known German-speaking places rhyme with ‘ride’?

None that I could find.

Instead, I decided that the choirmaster was from the south side of a German town. Potsdam fitted nicely, it’s a suburb of Berlin. Berlin would also have worked, but it’s hardly obscure.

Finally, we have a German-speaking choirmaster who is helping me, a poor fragile creature, to allow myself to say a word that sounds rude in English.

I added a title, in German, that uses the not-rude word. And, to make sure he’s using the correct word for ‘you’, I added the fact that it was my solo he was stopping. If he was talking to the whole choir², he’d have said ‘Warum haben Sie angst?” and that wouldn’t have fitted as well.

Ein poetischer Fahrt

A choirmaster from Potsdam (south side)
Stopped my solo again and he sighed
"Warum hast du angst?
"Das Wort, das du sangst,
"Sounds rude but it only means ride."

1. Yes, Mrs S, I am Mr Fancypants for doing a bilingual limerick ↩︎
2. Or someone of superior social status ↩︎