The Rhyme of All Flesh
Anonymous
9781465532718
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
THE origin of the limerick— like so much of the merrier side of mankinds story— is lost, forgotten somewhere in the grim chaos of making history. No matter. Its perpetual rebirth suffices. It may be said, however, that the limerick is the most ancient verse form known, as it were, to the human ear. It has therefore won the sanction of time if not of the puritans, who, in a shrewd effort to avoid extinction, invented sin, toward which they appear remarkably ungrateful. Dr. Oscar Wells Toomwhite, PhD, Oxford’s late great Egyptologist and author of the song hit Mummy, said that in the times of the more boisterous pharaohs such as the Ptolemys, death— and by no means a pretty one—was the penalty for a bad limerick. Unfortunately, none of the Egyptian rhymes has come down to us, perhaps due to the work of unpoetic priests who held them to be unprintable or, as the Egyptians doubtless expressed it, unchiselable. Among the Greeks, Socrates and Aristophanes were, according to chroniclers, skilled composers of limericks, though again none are preserved for our culture and guidance. (Plutarch informs us that the stanzas of Socrates were savagely destroyed by his virago-wife Xanthippe— at whom they were mostly directed— after the great philosopher’s draught of the hemlock. She burned many but ate the more damaging, fearing that even ashes might be read and immortalized.) In Roman times, we find that the pungent Horace and even the stately Virgil were leaders of thought in limerick form, turning blithely from their sonorous odes and majestic epics to the more trenchant favorite. Mark Antony is said to have despatched— by fast trireme— many a blunt, soldierly rhyme to his sultry but not unhumorous queen, and she to have replied with many a quippy papyrus born on the wings of a trained ibis. (This intelligent bird made but one mistake in its discreet lifetime, when it descended absent-mindedly into Caesar’s patio instead of Antony’s.) XT is not surprising that during the Dark and Middle Ages the gay limerick is nowhere to be heard. With the Renaissance and the rise of English literature, especially during the glorious Elizabethan period, the limerick flowers like some merrily winking rose. Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe (unhappily knifed to his end by an inebriated limerick critic) Donne, Lyly and many Others formed their wit and philosophy to fit the epigrammatic and irresistibly rhythmic five-line frame. Indeed, Sir Philip Sidney informs us that there was no surer entree to the court of Good Queen Bess than a fetching limerick, for her Majestie did dote upon that cheerie rhyme. This would indicate that Elizabeth’s standard of humor was rather higher than represented in a coarse and scurrilous play by Mark Twain. In general, the great writers of English who have not tried their hand at the limerick are rarities, and to these may be imputed either too great pomposity or too fine preciosity for such robust work. Samuel Johnson, for example, never wrote a limerick because, as Boswell remarks, he knew scarce a word small enough to make but a single line. A HE limerick and its aficionados presume— perhaps naively— that all words are created free and equal. Like children, words are unmoral; it is our own morals and customs which determine what dress they shall wear and what they will be when they grow up. The limerick makes no distinction between the lusty problem children among words, those interesting but so trying brats who sleep on the doorstep of lexicography, and the verbal Little Lord Fauntleroys who go to nice parties, carry delicate meanings from doctors to rich old ladies, assist lovers through the shy period, and so on, thereafter resuming their polite place in Webster’s marble halls. To the limerick-writer a word is a word and the one that states the case or draws the picture best gets the job. The unbathed and laconic few unblessed by Webster were probably left out because every one knows them anyway— and let him who doth not, cast the first stone and turn to page 1. A lethargic old fellow named Scott Enticed a young girl to his yacht; Being too tired to rafie her He made darts out of fiafier, Which he listlessly tossed at her twat. s *OME scholars prefer the use of the word languidly to listlessly in the last line. That is for the raconteur himself (or the raconteuse herself) to decide___To our editorial ear, however, listlessly better conveys the utter sadness and despair of senility. It gives Scott a certain tragic stature— yet sporting withal… . for he is out, but not down. On the Other hand (known to scholars as the dexter paw) the word languidly implies mere boredom, which the circumstances do not warrant
