Today’s Limerick challenge was to rhyme the word ‘disease’.
I was going nowhere with this for ages. There are plenty of rhymes available, but how to make it interesting?
Initially I tried to work in words to do with living by water for some reason. I worked on the idea that living by the sea or a river would be healthy. That went nowhere.
Later – after writing another blog about weird films, going shopping, doing a bit of design work, cooking dinner (Thai green curry) and watching an episode of Taskmaster NZ, I mentioned the trouble I was having to Mrs S. Among the words she suggested was ‘Socrates’ (from the film Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) and I thought “hang on – who’s the Greek guy that the Hippocratic oath is named after?” Took me a while to remember.
So-crates, the old Greek philosopher dude, benefits from 20th century wisdom.
Hippocrates, that’s the bloke!
Younger daughter helpfully added that Hippocrates used to drink wee. Not for leisure purposes, but to detect diabetes.
If I could make Hippocrates fit into the meter of the limerick, I was most of the way there. And then jam as many rhymes into the last line as possible (see the ‘absurd’ limerick for my previous go at this).
The middle section was the last part to be written, which isn’t how I usually go. I’d tried ‘before you say ‘wick’/ they’ll make you less sick’ which wasn’t satisfying English, and ‘wick’ as a synonym for ‘fast’ is quite specific Lancashire dialect.
Other names for doctors passed through my mind. I thought about ‘bone-setter’, to rhyme with ‘get better’, then hit on the most famous sci-fi doctor, Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy. His nickname is short for ‘saw-bones’, a Victorian epithet for surgeon.
It’s worse than that, it’s a limerick, Jim!
Why do you go to a doctor? Because you’re ill and need to moan to someone. And with that, the short lines were done.
Got lurgy, a cough or a sneeze? See a modern-day Hippocrates A decent saw-bones Will attend to your moans Then squeeze fees to ease your disease
The idea of a doctor demanding a fee is a bit old-fashioned, at least in the UK. Even if you go private it’s a matter that the insurance company sorts out.
Following up on the limerick challenge about the word ‘tanka‘, and how it took three goes to persuade autocorrect that that was the word I wanted, I thought about a limerick on tanks.
Last weekend the work was ‘tatanka’ – an Iroquois word for bison. I couldn’t think of any new rhymes for this word, except ‘Jovanka’, the surname of one of Doctor Who’s companion1. Maybe the Doctor and Jovanka meeting a tatanka in Sri Lanka… nah.
Inspiration – tanks a lot!
Mrs S asked me what sort of tank I was going to write about, she suggested ‘tank top’. After a wee bit of thought, I said ‘all of them’.
Well, not all of them. There are a lot of tanks and there are only so many syllables you can fit in a limerick. Though a limerick that just names tanks and nothing else… no, that’s too daft.
Middle section
I often find that getting the middle section (the couplet of lines three and four) helps suggest the tone of the limerick. I’m not sure that ‘tone’ is the right word. But, whatever. Younger child gave me a couplet a while ago for a limerick about the 1970s. I need to do something with it.
Sofas in plastic And food set in aspic
If not a limerick, maybe a new version of A Few of my Favourite Things2.
The idea that food in aspic was a staple of 1970s cuisine is very much from the Columbo episode Murder Under Glass. While she’s not a particular fan of Columbo, these episodes are on often enough that she is very familiar with this programme.
For the ‘tanks’ limerick, the question ‘which one?’ could be answered with ‘military tanks’. Or, in limerick terms, ‘the type with a gun’.
A list of tank types that fitted the rhythm for the final line would round off the piece. The list (below) are the ones I could think of. I’m sure there are more.
Water, septic, rocket, fuel, Tank Girl, think tank, tank top, fish, oil
Nine of them. Not so many, but I could get a last line out of a list. The question then was – what’s the last word, and what’s the rhyme going to be? Of those words, the one that fits best to the end of a list is ‘fish’.
A fish tank. There are many types of tanks, and this is certainly one of them.
Time to finish this
So on to the first two lines. I’ve done poems about love already – the pentastichophobe limerick, for example. Now, Mrs S isn’t a fan of poetry and I’ve never written her love poems3. Would she like me to start, now that we’re both over 40 (hem, hem)? No. She would dismiss the thought with a ‘pish and tish’, channelling the high-minded lady of the manor she was born to be. She wants a poem about tanks – this was her idea, after all.
"A love poem?" she said. "Pish and tish!
"A verse about tanks is my wish!"
"But tell me, which one?
"The type with a gun,
"Think, septic, top, water or fish?"
I think that fits the brief.
Tegan Jovanka, an Australian flight attendant, played by an actual Australian, Janet Fielding. She stayed in the role for four years, bridging the Tom Baker – Peter Davison eras. ↩︎
Today’s Reddit limerick challenge had me dashing to the dictionary again. The challenging word to rhyme was tanka.
I’m not the only one unfamiliar with this word. It took three goes before the auto-correct would accept that I wasn’t trying to type ‘tanks’. The tanka is a Japanese verse form, five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. So another form that would repel a pentastichophobe.
I don’t know how much poetry has been written about tanks, armoured, fish or water.
With its strictly defined syllable structure, the tanka has a similarity with the limerick; though because the limerick is a comic verse form you’re allowed to muck around with this.
Let’s get this limerick writ
My first thought was that it may be possible to write lines that could be rearranged to change the meaning of the poem depending on whether it was presented as a limerick or tanka. Brian Bilston did this in his poem Refugees, which reads differently depending on which direction you read it in.
I didn’t think too long about it before I realised it would be quite a very tricky thing to do and I wasn’t up for that challenge right now. Or maybe ever.
So, to write a limerick with tanka as a rhyme and have someone from somewhere in Japan as a subject. I couldn’t think of any places in Japan that rhyme with ‘tanka’, so maybe put that into the third and fourth lines. ‘Thank her’ was a placeholder rhyme that made it into the final version.
The city of Sapporo on Hokkaido – Japan’s northernmost island – is rich with rhyming words; ‘borrow’ came to mind quickly and the idea of stealing someone’s work came from that to the final form. Some mucking around with the exact words to get a better flow and avoid repeating words gave me the final limerick:
There was a young girl from Sapporo A poet whose genius I’d borrow She’d write me a tanka I’d fulsomely thank her Then publish as mine on the morrow
The write of reply
Now, how would you feel in the place of the girl from Sapporo? You’d poured your heart into these poems only to find that the cad was passing your work off as his own. You’d do what every right thinking person would do: write a poem about it.
In Sapporo style I would write my love tanka So earnest his thanks!
My heart broke when I found his Longstanding plagiarism
I’ve no idea if there’s a particular Sapporo style to tanka.
The last book I read – 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson – was about 550 pages, 150,000 words. This likely ranks high in the longest books I’ve ever read, though not the top. The longest book I’ve read is Lord of the Rings. The book exceeds 1,000 pages, though publishers normally present it as three volumes. I’ve read it twice. Once in 1980, again in 2022.
When I was a teenager I went through a phase of reading square fantasy novels. In my memory, at least, they were weighty tomes. Last Legends of Earth AA Attanasio spans eight thousand years. In my memory it’s a heavyweight book, but at 450 pages it’s more of a welterweight. Other works that seem huge – Magician by Raymond E Feist for example- are less than 500 pages. I’ve started Ulysses a couple of times, which is pretty big novel at 730 pages. Perdido Street Station by China Miéville weighs in at 870 pages, the other three Bas Lag novels are a bit shorter1. The book, weighing in at 660g, is the longest single-volume work I’ve read.
A good, thick book. It’s an industrial fantasy book, set on the world of Bas Lag where mechanics, chemistry and magic are all real.
The first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776) was described by the Duke of Gloucester2 as:
Mrs S is currently reading Sunne in Splendour (1982) by Sharon Penman. It’s over 1200 pages, she’s 400 pages in. Weighing 870g, it needs wrist strengthening exercises to read. Mrs S believes that Richard III3 was done dirty by Shakespeare, and if the dead could sue for defamation then he’d be within his rights to do so.
This is Mrs S’s current read. It’s the story about Richard III, from boyhood to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485.
A limerick to lighten the mood
To go with the limericks I’ve written about Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet, the third (of three) Shakespeare limericks is about the play Richard III. Its historical accuracy is debated.
On the Historical Verisimilitude of the Play Richard III by William Shakespeare Now! Was Gloucester, mis-shapen 'none ruder'? A tyrannical, prince-killing brooder? He wouldn't, of course, Swap his throne for a horse. But the victor was definitely Tudor
His latest book, The Rouse, is 1264 pages. It’s due to be published on 17th September 2026 (tomorrow, as I write this), so I’ve not even seen it in the shops yet. ↩︎
Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh (1743 – 1805) was a brother of King George III. He had wished for active service in the military. Alas, his health and intelligence were deemed to be insufficient. ↩︎
Who, coincidentally, was the Duke of Gloucester before he became king. ↩︎
Back from holiday (Ten days in Brittany. Very nice, thanks. I should write a blog about it, you say? Oh, OK) and there have been two limerick challenges on the subreddit since I last looked. The words to rhyme in limericks were absurd (22nd August) and pentastichophobe (29th August).
It is so wearisome to have to follow one’s muse.
There are different challenges with these words. There are loads of rhymes for absurd, so getting a poem that avoids obvious rhymes is the key. Or, since there are so many rhymes, why not try and pack a load into the piece?
For the second word, the first thing to do was find out what pentastichophobe means. A quick Google told me that it’s someone who fears or hates five-line poems. So they wouldn’t be a fan of limericks, at least not in their normal presentation. On the other hand, Edward Lear would often present his limericks1 as four lines with the two short lines as a single line. So playing with the formatting is a possible way to go.
Aren’t all limericks absurd?
Taking inspiration from the ‘young fellow named Tate’ limerick I quoted in my first limerick post, I built this limerick from the bottom up. Once I had the last line, I had to reach it.
I collected a dozen rhymes for absurd before the final line “my word! That furred bird is absurd” emerged.
Other words for fur – hair, pelt, mane, wool, fuzz… none rhyme with each other, but pelt and felt give the rhymes for the two short lines. But what one syllable bird? A hen – which also has a lot of synonyms of various length to put into the first two lines.
A fear the potential dangers of genetic engineering came to me as the subject for this one. If I’m writing about furry birds, then some sort of tinkering with genetics has been going on. You can’t trust scientists.
I had a couple of goes at filling in the first lines of the limerick, then read it out to Mrs S. She didn’t like my first draft.
Try harder.
It was the first two lines that were the problem, so a rewrite to introduce the issue of genetic engineering. A blurred line between the species and the piece is done. Using the word twixt was necessary to keep my poetic licence intact.
The line twixt the species is blurred They've bred hairy chickens, I've heard I can say, now I've felt A hen with a pelt: "My word! That furred bird is absurd!"
A fear of five line poems
The second challenge is a different matter. Any long and unusual word2 needs to be shoehorned into the meter of a limerick, and it is sometimes necessary to draw attention to the shoehorning. But since this word is about poetry, the limerick should also address the fact that this is a poem. Self-referential poems and songs are usually something I don’t like3.
I decided to play with the format of the limerick. If five lines is the problem, then we can change the number of lines and still get a silly poem out of it. And to whom do we write poetry? Usually, a subject of love. What sort of poem? How about a sonnet?
What’s a sonnet, Daddy?
A sonnet is a 14-line poem with a strict rhyme and meter scheme. So, a bit like a limerick. William Shakespeare wrote at least 154 sonnets4, going against the contemporary norm of idealistic love and introducing the concepts of lust and infidelity. That said, the best-known line from his sonnets (Sonnet 18) is a heart-felt tribute to a lover:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate
You’re supposed to keep to 5 lines in a limerick. How can you write a 14-line limerick?
You cheat.
Drafting and shaping the limerick
When I was drafting the limerick, I had the middle section quickly. Since bonnet rhymes with sonnet, the couplet “I’ve a bee in my bonnet – I’ll write her a sonnet” serves well. Then I wrote the numbers 1 to 14 and drafted a couple of last lines that could be written one word per line to reach 14.
The rhyming words had to end in ‘-obe’. Luckily, there are plenty of those including, handily, a couple of real places. It’s a tradition in limericks to start with a place-name at the end of the first line. I chose Latrobe, a town in Victoria, Australia5. And what do we want to see when we finally meet the love of our life? Why, to see them disrobe.
When I wrote the last line – “And maybe then I’ll get to see her disrobe” I was one word short, so I split the second line of the limerick into two, and so I’d got a 14 line poem:
I love a young girl from Latrobe A beauty- But pentastichaphobe I've a bee in my bonnet I'll write her a sonnet! And Maybe Then I'll Get To See Her Disrobe
They weren’t known as limericks until the 1890s, after Lear’s death. ↩︎
It was ultracrepidarian a couple of weeks ago. I rhymed that with hairy ‘un and onion. It makes sense, honest! ↩︎
I’m looking at you, Robbie Williams, with your “That’s a good line to take it to the bridge” nonsense. ↩︎
The 154 collected as one, plus six in his plays, plus no doubt he wrote others that are lost. Same goes for his limericks. ↩︎
There’s also a Latrobe in Tasmania and Pennsylvania. ↩︎
I threatened to return to limericks in a recent post, and here we are again. This time, it’s a limerick or two about dodos.
Dodos in literature
This is also inspired by a post on the limericks subreddit, but not by the ‘rhyme of the week’1. Someone posted a limerick about the dodo. Interestingly, googling “dodo limerick” only comes back with hits for a journalist and animal lover from Limerick, Ireland, known as Dodo Reddan.
The limerick poem and a reply are shown below.
Limerick and a reply on the subreddit /rlimericks.
The original poem – in case the image doesn’t show – is:
The dodo once lived on Mauritius, The sailors all thought it delicious, The rats and the men, Could all sneak up on them, Since the poor dodo wasn’t suspicious
There is a reply which starts with the phrase “Um, actually” (which I hate more than people starting a question with the word ‘question’), followed by a correction to the effect that the dodo was pretty inedible.
Now, only a small and petty man would get annoyed enough by this to write a reply limerick. So that’s exactly what I did.
There once was a bird called the dodo Whose knack for survival was so-so Pigs, rats and pests Would ravage their nests Though eating their flesh was a no-no
Not content with that, and since I’d seen that the Latin name for the dodo is raphus cucullatus, I wrote another.
The dodo (or raphus cucullatus) A victim of rats (rattus rattus) Their nests on the ground Could also be found By pigs and by cats (felis catus)
Shakespeare in limerick form
After remembering the Macbeth summary I wrote when I was doing my O levels, I found another Shakespeare limerick. This one, written some time in 2015, summarises Romeo and Juliet, the harrowing morality play dressed up as a love story. This limerick, like the second dodo limerick, makes heavy use of parentheses, because, well, why not?
Juliet love Montague hunk Who kills Paris (impetuous lunk!) There’s the balcony scene (What does ‘wherefore’ mean?) And they both die (I blame the monk)
Which is ‘dolor’. Or ‘dolour’, since I’m playing in the UK. ↩︎
