Dirty Limericks: Anonymous (Quirky Classics)

Product Information

Williams likens the women’s dress to autumn leaves falling from a tree, leaving her naked and exposed. Once the body has emerged, the speaker trails off with an ellipsis, leaving the events to follow up to the reader’s imagination. The poem stirs the ghost of Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), who closed a sonnet with a similar self-injunction:

Dirty Limericks Dirty Limericks

Perhaps most importantly know your audience and be sure they will like the type of joke. Be confident in your delivery, and timing is key to it hits properly. MORE MII ARTICLES ON IRISH JOKESAn Irish farmer was walking along the boundary between his and his neighbour’s fields when he spotted his neighbour carrying two sheep in his arms. Wordplay is an embellisher. It prettifies poetry’s architecture. If rhyme and meter are its beams and joists, wordplay is the artfully chiseled balustrade, the pillowed window seat, the foliated mantel frieze, the coordinated hues adorning the interior walls. Choice of paint is a crucial decision—potentially elevating a room from the merely functional to the inviting and comely. But it won’t keep your walls and ceiling from coming down. Wordplay is perhaps best understood as one of the tools that make possible poetry’s extraordinary concision. Partnered with meter and rhyme, it works beautifully to compress a wealth of feeling into a compact stanza. One of the reasons why the genre of the extremely brief short story in prose, the short short, interests me so little is that, to my mind, poetry does this sort of thing so much better. Here’s Frost again: The speaker confesses his jealousy of the woman’s corset for it sits so close to her breasts. He goes on to praise her beauty, declaring her body a pure and undiscovered land that he fully intends to explore.

14 of the Most Famous Limericks: Literary Classics

So you’ll sometimes behold the poet expressing through words (the only trusty tool she has) an impatience with words. You feel this powerfully in the closing lines of Bishop’s “One Art.” The poem, a villanelle, begins with a confident nonchalance:As she lowers herself down, she farts. She apologises and try’s again before farting a second time. Then you have the brevity of the poem, which requires uncommonly efficient use of language on the part of the writer. And yet the five short lines always manage to convey a complete picture or story. Here, too, is a story. The deceased have come to appreciate that death is a trifling matter. Grown clear-sighted with time, they now recognize that life’s ultimate rewards are few and fleeting. But they once felt otherwise, wholeheartedly.