Poetry can be bleak. Grief, despair, loss, heartbreak and pain are timeless and universal themes that continue to be explored by contemporary writers, in poems that resonate with unflinching emotional intensity. To write, or to read, such poetry can be cathartic and healing.

But poetry can also be light-hearted and fun. We can chuckle at the dry humour of Wendy Cope, or the witty ingenuity of Brian Bilston, even as we appreciate the apparently effortless craftsmanship of their writing. 

One of my earliest memories is of my father reading to me from A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young. To this day, I can still hear his voice reciting “The King’s Breakfast”. Books by Milne, Dr Seuss and Lewis Carroll adorned our shelves, providing me with hours of pleasure once I was old enough to read by myself. A particular favourite was Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense, a collection of limericks first published in 1846, with fabulously wacky illustrations by Lear himself.

A Book of Nonsense played a significant role in popularising the limerick, but the form already existed well before Lear’s time. The origins of the limerick are obscure. It first emerged in England in the early eighteenth century, when it seems to have been associated with drinking songs and ribald humour. The website A Blog of Bosh is a treasure trove of information about Edward Lear, limericks and nonsense literature generally. 

Part of the fun of a limerick lies in the tension between the tightly defined structure – five lines with a rhyme scheme of AABBA –  and the wildly unpredictable content. Limericks can be witty, grotesque, bawdy, playful, humorous or nonsensical. They lend themselves to wordplay, as in this gem by Ogden Nash, which delighted me as a child:

A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, "let us flee!"
"Let us fly!" said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

The limerick is one of the few poetic forms that is specifically associated with humour. Another is the clerihew, named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley (b. 1875, d. 1956), who invented the form while musing in science class as a schoolboy. A version of his first clerihew was published in 1905:

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

A clerihew is a quatrain with rhyme scheme AABB and which typically has irregular line length and metre. The first line features the name of a famous individual. The challenge is to find a rhyme for the second line to match the person’s name in the first line – the more comical or absurd, the better.

You can read a fine selection of clerihews at the website Brief Poems, including examples by G. K. Chesterton, W. H. Auden, George Szirtes, Derek Mahon and of course Edmund Clerihew Bentley himself. 

The July 2024 issue of The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (Volume 14, Issue 2) includes a portfolio of clerihews by contemporary mathematician-poets, curated by E.R. Lutken. It’s a delightfully tongue-in-cheek guide to the history of mathematics, that includes a couple of contributions by me. Here’s one of them:

Pythagoras
alas
had no clue what to do
with the square root of two. 

Limericks and clerihews are great fun to create. In their own way, they can also be healing and cathartic. Jane Austen wrote in Mansfield Park:  “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can…”, which is a sentiment I relate to more and more.   

I’ve posted some other clerihews on a mathematical theme here; and below is a silly, off-the-cuff limerick I’ve just written, because why not? We all need some silliness and fun in our lives.

A strange lady from Tunbridge Wells
liked to wear garlands and bells.
When she went to the park
the dogs would all bark,
but she shushed them with magical spells.