A Few Thoughts on Limericks

The 50th installment of Rhyme and Reason, my weekly set of limericks for the Sunday Times of India, appeared today. I might be the only person in the world who gets paid for writing limericks, and the credit for this section has to go to Neelam Raaj, the editor at the Sunday ToI who saw me messing around with limericks on Twitter and asked me to write some for their columns page. I’ve never seen any other newspaper in the world run verse on their edit page, so this is a bold conception to begin with, and would never have occurred to me.

Until then, I’d been doing it for fun, but once you start getting paid for it, and published on a platform like that, you need to take it seriously. No guidelines existed, though: many folks—including Shakespeare—had tried the form, and a handful (like Ogden Nash) did some amazing work in it, but limericks have been more lighthearted bar-room amusement than a serious form. I would have to be my own guide. So, within a few weeks, I formulated the following set of three rules for myself.

1. The basic form of a the limerick must be sacrosanct. A limerick is not just a rhyme scheme of aabba, but also a syllable scheme of 99669. (One can do TT66T or 99559, but this pattern is important for the musicality that distinguishes limericks) I didn’t care about this when I would write them for Twitter, but decided that it was important to be disciplined about this.

2. The limerick should contain normal sentences with perfect grammar. They should not only be musical when read aloud, but also normal sentences that would not sound not out of place in conversation. As a nod to one poetic convention, I capitalise the beginning of each of the five lines. But the grammar otherwise is as it would be in prose. (This capitalisation is also necessary because it appears in a narrow column on the ToI page,and the longer lines sometimes get broken in two. The capitals indicate where each of the five limerick lines begin for someone who is reading it for the first time and may not be familiar with the form.)

3. The content of the limerick has to be worth putting out there even as prose. That is, the limerick needs to say something that would be worth saying even if it hadn’t been crafted into this form. A limerick should never have the sole purpose of saying, ‘Look Ma, I can rhyme!’ Indeed, guidelines 1 and 2 above are the easy part. So whether it’s a quip or satire or serious commentary, it should stand on its own, outside the form.

I’ve attempted to use this form not just for light-hearted quips, but also for serious commentary. Sometimes, I’ve blown it, especially with regards to 3, but at least I know what I don’t like about those. Equally, I’ve sometimes messed it up even after getting all three guidelines right because I chose a non-musical sentence construction, like the time I put three stresses one after another. (This is called a Molossus.) Iambic works best, and when one deviates, one should know why.

So yeah, a lot of effort goes into making it look easy. That said, writing verse is a de-stresser for me, and thus the opposite of any other writing I do. Rhyme & Reason is a work on progress, so I hope it keeps getting better. You can check out the archives here.