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.
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. ↩︎
