Poetry, Jingles, Doggerel and Song Lyrics

[Anita Bensoussane]

Last night I was reading Loads and Loads of Limericks collected by David G. Harris, so I thought I'd share a few of my favourites:

A crazy young student from Shoreham
Made brown paper trousers and wore 'em.
He looked nice and neat
Till he bent in the street
To pick up a pin; then he tore 'em.


There was a strange lady whose spine
Was replaced with a mercury line.
In wintertime she
Measured just four foot three,
While in summer she hit six foot nine.


A smart little dingo named Rover,
Whilst munching a strawberry pavlova,
Said,"If this is Down Under,
Where on earth then I wonder,
Is that marvellous place called Up Over?"


There once was a baker named Jake
Who stumbled whilst mixing a cake.
His wife cooked the lot
In the oven so hot,
And gobbled him up by mistake.


A cheerful old bear at the zoo
Could always find something to do;
When it bored him to go
On a walk to and fro
He reversed it and walked fro and to.


There was a young girl in a bog,
Met a prince who was perched on a log.
She gave him a kiss
Which for her was sheer bliss,
But the prince just turned into a frog.

[Bertie]

I've always loved the Oliver Wendell Holmes line: And silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of sound.
It's from his poem 'The Music-Grinders' from 1836, which has a nice rhythm and light hearted turn of phrase...

There are three ways in which men take
One's money from his purse,
And very hard it is to tell
Which of the three is worse;
But all of them are bad enough
To make a body curse.

You're riding out some pleasant day,
And counting up your gains;
A fellow jumps from out a bush,
And takes your horse's reins,
Another hints some words about
A bullet in your brains.

It's hard to meet such pressing friends
In such a lonely spot;
It's very hard to lose your cash,
But harder to be shot;
And so you take your wallet out,
Though you would rather not.

Perhaps you're going out to dine,--
Some odious creature begs
You'll hear about the cannon-ball
That carried off his pegs,
And says it is a dreadful thing
For men to lose their legs.

He tells you of his starving wife,
His children to be fed,
Poor little, lovely innocents,
All clamorous for bread,--
And so you kindly help to put
A bachelor to bed.

You're sitting on your window-seat,
Beneath a cloudless moon;
You hear a sound, that seems to wear
The semblance of a tune,
As if a broken fife should strive
To drown a cracked bassoon.

And nearer, nearer still, the tide
Of music seems to come,
There's something like a human voice,
And something like a drum;
You sit in speechless agony,
Until your ear is numb.

Poor "home, sweet home" should seem to be
A very dismal place;
Your "auld acquaintance" all at once
Is altered in the face;
Their discords sting through Burns and Moore,
Like hedgehogs dressed in lace.

You think they are crusaders, sent
From some infernal clime,
To pluck the eyes of Sentiment,
And dock the tail of Rhyme,
To crack the voice of Melody,
And break the legs of Time.

But hark! the air again is still,
The music all is ground,
And silence, like a poultice, comes
To heal the blows of sound;
It cannot be,-- it is,-- it is,--
A hat is going round!

No! Pay the dentist when he leaves
A fracture in your jaw,
And pay the owner of the bear
That stunned you with his paw,
And buy the lobster that has had
Your knuckles in his claw;

But if you are a portly man,
Put on your fiercest frown,
And talk about a constable
To turn them out of town;
Then close your sentence with an oath,
And shut the window down!

And if you are a slender man,
Not big enough for that,
Or, if you cannot make a speech,
Because you are a flat,
Go very quietly and drop
A button in the hat!

[Anita Bensoussane]

Heh - I like the lines:

It's very hard to lose your cash,
But harder to be shot;
And so you take your wallet out,
Though you would rather not.

[pete9012S]

Enid Blyton's Treasury of Verse (Purnell 1979) -The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies Oct 1924

[Anita Bensoussane]

Reading The Blue Peter Book of Limericks, which contains a selection of limericks submitted for the 1971 Blue Peter Limerick Competition, I particularly enjoyed the following entries:


There was a poor moggie from Hyde
Who heard that next door's dog had died.
He went through the gate,
Met a terrible fate,
'Cos the cat that had told him had lied! (Richard Booth, aged 11)


There was a young fellow called Fred,
Had an elephant sit on his head.
Where the elephant sat,
Fred's head grew quite flat,
But Fred didn't care, he was dead! (Audrey Freeland, aged 12)


There was a young man of Arbroath
Who kept for a pet a large sloth.
He said, 'It's quite nice,
But it doesn't like mice,
So I buy fish and chips for us both.' (Deborah Westover, aged 11)


There was an old man of Berlin
Whose eyeballs were made out of tin.
Whenever he cried,
They went rusty inside,
And brown teardrops ran down to his chin. (J. L. Honour, aged 11)

[Boodi 2]

[Anita Bensoussane]

Kate Mary commented on The Book of a Thousand Poems (1942) in another thread the other day, prompting me to leaf through my copy. There's a lovely poem for November by Margaret Rose, which paints a beautiful picture:

NOVEMBER
November is a spinner
Spinning in the mist,
Weaving such a lovely web
Of gold and amethyst.
In among the shadows
She spins till close of day,
Then quietly she folds her hands
And puts her work away.

[Courtenay]

That's a lovely poetic way of looking at November, Anita — thank you

However, I'm also reminded of a much more cynical take that a friend who hated cold weather used to quote (to be fair, she'd grown up in the tropics and never took to English weather, despite living here for most of her adult life):

No! — by Thomas Hood

No sun — no moon!
No morn — no noon —
No dawn — no dusk — no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member —
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! —
November!

[Anita Bensoussane]

[pete9012S]

This made me smile:

[Lucky Star]

[Judith Crabb]

Since childhood I have loved Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Requiem' - 'Under the wide and starry sky...' but had totally forgotten another early love by Walter Savage Landor until I came across it by chance a few days ago -
'I strove with none for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved and next to nature Art,
I warmed both hands before the fire of life
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.'
Now I note that I am of the same age as Landor was when he wrote the poem and I can understand the sentiment much more fully.
Incidentally in (unpoetic) real life Landor was a total curmudgeon and caused strife for everybody, but I remember as a child thinking that the first line was a truly noble sentiment (along the lines of Kipling's 'If').

[Anita Bensoussane]

I've always liked the line "Nature I loved and next to nature Art".

A few weeks ago I was reading some poems from The Poetry of Earth, which we know Enid Blyton had as a teenager and kept all her life. I particularly enjoyed these lines from Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall':


In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.


Enid Blyton often wrote in her stories about birds getting brighter plumage/beaks in the spring.

[Bertie]

Since childhood I have loved Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Requiem' - 'Under the wide and starry sky...' but had totally forgotten another early love by Walter Savage Landor until I came across it by chance a few days ago -
'I strove with none for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved and next to nature Art,
I warmed both hands before the fire of life
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.'
Now I note that I am of the same age as Landor was when he wrote the poem and I can understand the sentiment much more fully.
Incidentally in (unpoetic) real life Landor was a total curmudgeon and caused strife for everybody, but I remember as a child thinking that the first line was a truly noble sentiment (along the lines of Kipling's 'If').

Yes, those are lovely lines of Landor's.
I've heard them in the past but, like you, had forgotten about it. Thanks for reminding me about them.

[pete9012S]

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