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The Best Light Verse of All Time
Examples of Light Verse
Which poets wrote the best light verse?
Humorous poetry goes by a number of different names: light verse, light
poetry, humorous verse, nonsense verse, puns, doggerel, limericks, clerihews,
double dactyls, spoonerisms, epigrams, McWhirtles, and so on. I will give
examples of the genre and various sub-genres, citing some of the very best
humorous poets, including Hilaire Belloc, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Wendy Cope,
T. S. Eliot, Eugene Field, Robert Frost, Mother Goose, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash,
Dorothy Parker, Dr. Seuss, William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. And then, of
course, there is the greatest of all humorists, Anonymous!
Light verse can be merely for the sake of fun, but it can also be wise and
enlightening. Here are two of my favorite examples, which I liked so much I
translated them myself:
The imbecile
constructs cages
for everyone he knows,
while the sage
(who has to duck his head whenever the moon glows)
keeps dispensing keys
all night long
to the beautiful, rowdy,
prison gang.
—by Hafiz, translation by Michael R. Burch
Raise your words, not their volume.
Rain grows flowers, not thunder.
—by Rumi,
translation by Michael R. Burch
Stellar Examples of Light Verse aka Humorous Verse
Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda water the day after.
—George Gordon, Lord Byron
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
and I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
—Robert Frost
The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.
—Ogden Nash
The ant has made himself illustrious
Through constant industry industrious.
So what?
Would you be calm and placid
If you were full of formic acid?
—Ogden Nash
Is there any reward?
I'm beginning to doubt it.
I am broken and bored,
Is there any reward
Reassure me, Good Lord,
And inform me about it.
Is there any reward?
I'm beginning to doubt it.
—Hilaire Belloc
Spoonerisms
A spoonerism may be defined as an unintentional (or intentional) slip
of the tongue: "whore to culture" for horticulture, "belly jeans" for "jelly
beans," etc. The spoonerism is also known as the Morrowsky, after a Polish count
with a speech impediment. Yogi Berra, the hall-of-fame New York Yankees catcher,
is perhaps the most famous modern person known for such malaprops (or is that an
example, with the proper word being "malapropism"?).
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me
than a frontal lobotomy.
—Dorothy Parker
You can lead a whore to culture,
but you can't make her think.
—Dorothy Parker
The second spoonerism above was allegedly provided after Dorothy Parker was
asked to use the word "horticulture" during a game of
Can-You-Give-Me-A-Sentence. It is a pun on the old saw, "You can lead a horse to
water, but you can't make him drink." (You can find other puns below.)
Nonsense Verse
Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash, "Mother Goose" and Dr.
Seuss are among the best-known penners of nonsense verse. Nonsense verse is
often whimsical or fantastical (i.e., highly improbable).
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, "It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!"
—Edward Lear
There was a young lady of station
"I love man" was her sole exclamation
But when men cried, "You flatter"
She replied, "Oh! no matter!
Isle of Man is the true explanation."
—Lewis Carroll
Hey diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle.
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such fun,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
—Mother Goose
Puns
A pun is a play on words, in which words are often reversed, twisted around, or
used "against the grain" or in unexpected ways.
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.—Oscar Wilde
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.—Oscar Wilde
I have nothing to declare except my genius.—Oscar Wilde, to a
customs officer
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.—Oscar Wilde
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.—Dorothy Parker
If all the girls who attended Yale were laid end to
end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.—Dorothy Parker
Ducking for apples—change one letter and it's the story of my life.—Dorothy
Parker
You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.—Dorothy Parker
Doggerel
Doggerel is the opposite of uppity poetry. The best doggerel gives the
appearance of being hackneyed, trite, childish or insipid, while making sharp,
cutting points.
Willy Nilly
by Michael R. Burch
for the Demiurge aka Yahweh/Jehovah
Isn’t it silly, Willy Nilly?
You made the stallion,
you made the filly,
and now they sleep
in the dark earth, stilly.
Isn’t it silly, Willy Nilly?
Isn’t it silly, Willy Nilly?
You forced them to run
all their days uphilly.
They ran till they dropped—
life’s a pickle, dilly.
Isn’t it silly, Willy Nilly?
Isn’t it silly, Willy Nilly?
They say I should worship you!
Oh, really!
They say I should pray
so you’ll not act illy.
Isn’t it silly, Willy Nilly?
What Would Santa Claus Say
by Michael R. Burch
What would Santa Claus say,
I wonder,
about Jesus returning
to kill and plunder?
For He’ll likely return
on Christmas day
to blow the bad
little boys away!
When He flashes like lightning
across the skies
and many a homosexual
dies,
when the harlots and heretics
are ripped asunder,
what will the Easter Bunny think,
I wonder?
Clerihews
The clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund
Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem's subject, usually a
famous person portrayed in an absurd light. The rhyme scheme is AABB. The line
length and meter are irregular. In 1983, Games Magazine ran a contest
titled "Do You Clerihew?" The winning entry was:
Did Descartes
Depart
With the thought
"Therefore I'm not"?
Rene Descartes is, of course, famous for the maxim: "I think, therefore I am."
Double Dactyls
The double dactyl is a verse form invented by Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal in
1961. Like the limerick, it has a specific structure and is usually humorous.
There must be two stanzas, each comprising three lines of dactylic dimeter
followed by a line consisting of just a choriamb. The two stanzas must rhyme on
their last lines. The first line of the first stanza is repetitive nonsense. The
second line of the first stanza is the subject of the poem, a proper noun. The
name must itself be double-dactylic. There is also a requirement for at least
one line of the second stanza to be entirely one double dactyl word. Some
purists still follow Hecht and Pascal's original rule that no single
six-syllable word, once used in a double dactyl, should ever be knowingly used
again.
Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson
Liked to use dashes
Instead of full stops.
Nowadays, faced with such
Idiosyncrasy,
Critics and editors
Send for the cops.
—Wendy Cope
Limericks
The most common form of the limerick is a stanza of five lines, with the first,
second and fifth lines rhyming with each another and having three feet of three
syllables each, while the third and fourth lines rhyme with each
other, but are shorter, having only two feet of three syllables. The metrical "foot"
employed is usually the anapest, (ta-ta-TUM), but limericks can also be
amphibrachic (ta-TUM-ta).
There was a young lady named Bright
who traveled much faster than light.
She set out one day
in a relative way,
and came back the previous night.
—Anonymous
I find it interesting that one of the best revelations of the weirdness and
zaniness of
relativity can be found in a limerick. The limerick above inspired me to pen a rejoinder:
Einstein, the frizzy-haired,
claimed E equals MC squared;
thus
all mass decreases
as activity ceases ...
not my mass, my ass declared!
—Michael R. Burch
Edward Lear has been called the "father" and the "poet laureate" of the limerick because he
helped popularize the form. To be frank, I believe other poets, particularly Ogden
Nash, have penned better limericks, but I do admire this one, which has been
attributed to Lear:
There was a young lady of Niger
who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
with the lady inside,
and the smile on the face of the tiger.
—attributed to Edward Lear and William Cosmo Monkhouse
Here's another of my all-time favorites, which illustrates how punning wordplay
can enrich and enliven limericks:
A wonderful bird is the pelican;
His beak can hold more than his belican.
He can hold in his beak
Enough food for a week,
Though I’m damned if I know how the helican!
—Dixon Lanier Merritt (often incorrectly
ascribed to Ogden Nash)
The limerick above reminds me of something Dorothy Parker once said about Oscar
Wilde: that when she read an especially good epigram,
she always assumed Wilde was the author. Ogden Nash holds a similar place of
distinction in the pantheon of limerick writers. One thing Nash did wonderfully
well was ignore the "rules" that often result in
stiffly corseted formal poems. Nash's poems tend to be funny, irreverent,
whimsical and "loosey-goosy." (Nash is to limericks as e. e. cummings
is to sonnets.) Here are
a few
of Nash's best limericks:
There was a young belle of old Natchez
Whose garments were always in patchez.
When comments arose
On the state of her clothes,
She replied, "When Ah itchez, Ah scratchez."
—Ogden Nash
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.
—Ogden Nash
There are more poems by Nash later on this page. If we give credit to Lear for
popularizing the form, shouldn't we give even more credit to Nash for perfecting
it? In any case, moving on, some of the best limericks are "naughty" poems
written by the greatest of all poets, Anonymous:
There was a young man from Savannah
Who died in a curious manner:
He whittled a hole
In a telephone pole
And electrified his banana.
—Anonymous
There was a young gal name of Sally
Who loved an occasional dally.
She sat on the lap
Of a well-endowed chap
Crying, "Gee, Dick, you're right up my alley!"
—Anonymous (I touched this one up slightly)
A pious young lady of Chichester
Made all the pale saints in their niches stir.
And each morning at matin
Her breast in pink satin
Made the bishop of Chichester's breeches stir.
—Anonymous (I also touched this one up slightly)
As one critic put it, the limerick "is the vehicle of cultivated, unrepressed sexual humor in
the English language." But while some experts claim that the only "real" limerick is an
obscene or bawdy one, the form
really took off initially, in terms of popularity, as a vehicle for nonsense verse and children's poems, such as the
Mother Goose nursery rhymes:
Hickory dickory dock,
the mouse ran up the clock;
the clock struck one
and down he run;
hickory dickory dock.
—Mother Goose
There once was a leopardess, Dot,
who indignantly answered: "I’ll not!
The gents are impressed
with the way that I’m dressed.
I wouldn’t change even one spot."
—Michael R. Burch
The origin of the name "limerick" for this poetic form is still being debated.
The term was first officially documented in England in 1898, in the New
English Dictionary, but the form itself is much older. The name is generally
considered to be a reference to the
city or county of Limerick, Ireland, and may derive from a parlor game that
included a refrain such as "Will [or won't] you come (up) to
Limerick?" The earliest known use of the name "limerick" for a
short, humorous lyric is an 1880 reference in a New Brunswick
newspaper to a tune apparently well-known at the time, "Won’t you come to Limerick?" That article included this verse:
There was a young rustic named Mallory,
who drew but a very small salary.
When he went to the show,
his purse made him go
to a seat in the uppermost gallery.
The earliest published American limerick appeared in 1902 in the Princeton Tiger:
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
Related "sequels" were soon published.
Of these, two of the most famous appeared, respectively, in the Chicago
Tribune and the New York Press:
But he followed the pair to Pawtucket,
The man and the girl with the bucket;
And he said to the man,
He was welcome to Nan,
But as for the bucket, Pawtucket.
Then the pair followed Pa to Manhasset,
Where he still held the cash as an asset;
But Nan and the man
Stole the money and ran,
And as for the bucket, Manhasset.
There continue to be modern sequels, including this bawdy one of mine:
There was a lewd whore from Nantucket
who intended to pee in a bucket;
but being a man
she missed the damn can
and her rattled john fled crying, "Fuck it!"
—Variation on a classic limerick by Michael R. Burch
There once was a Baptist named Mel
who condemned all non-Christians to hell.
When he stood before God
he felt like a clod
to discover His Love couldn’t fail!
—Michael R. Burch
But then of course there are perfectly innocent humorous poems:
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
by Eugene Field
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe—
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in that beautiful sea—
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish—
Never afeard are we";
So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam—
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home;
'T was all so pretty a sail it seemed
As if it could not be,
And some folks thought 't was a dream they 'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea—
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one's trundle-bed.
So shut your eyes while mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea,
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
These are some of my favorite humorous poems of my own:
Dot Spotted
by Michael R. Burch
There once was a leopardess, Dot,
who indignantly answered: "I’ll not!
The gents are impressed
with the way that I’m dressed.
I wouldn’t change even one spot."
Stage Craft-y
by Michael R. Burch
There once was a dromedary
who befriended a crafty canary.
Budgie said, "You can’t sing,
but now, here’s the thing—
just think of the tunes you can carry!"
Clyde Lied!
by Michael R. Burch
There once was a mockingbird, Clyde,
who bragged of his prowess, but lied.
To his new wife he sighed,
"When again, gentle bride?"
"Nevermore!" bright-eyed Raven replied.
Less Heroic Couplets: Murder Most Fowl!
by Michael R. Burch
“Murder most foul!”
cried the mouse to the owl.
“Friend, I’m no sinner;
you’re merely my dinner!”
the wise owl replied
as the tasty snack died.
Less Heroic Couplets: Meal Deal
by Michael
R. Burch
Love is a splendid ideal ...
at least till it costs us a meal.
Less Heroic Couplets: Bed Head
by Michael
R. Burch
“Early to bed, early to rise”
makes a man wish some men weren’t so wise
(or at least had the decency to tell pleasing lies).
Less Heroic Couplets: Sex Hex
by Michael
R. Burch
Love’s full of cute paradoxes
(and highly acute poxes).
Less Heroic Couplets: Generation Gap
by Michael R. Burch
A quahog clam,
age 405,
said, “Hey, it’s great
to be alive!”
I disagreed,
not feeling nifty,
babe though I am,
just pushing fifty.
A quahog clam found off the coast of Ireland is the longest-lived
animal on record, at an estimated age of 405 years.
Lance-Lot
by Michael R. Burch
Preposterous bird!
Inelegant! Absurd!
Until the great & mighty heron
brandishes his fearsome sword.
honeybee
by Michael R. Burch
love was a little treble thing—
prone to sing
and sometimes to sting
Kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’
by Michael R. Burch
Kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’
the bees rise
in a dizzy circle of two.
Oh, when I’m with you,
I feel like kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’ too.
Don’t ever hug a lobster!
by Michael R. Burch
Don’t ever hug a lobster, if you meet one on the street!
If you hug a lobster to your breast, you're apt to lose a teat!
If you hug a lobster lower down, it’ll snip away your privates!
If you hug a lobster higher up, it’ll leave your cheeks with wide vents!
So don’t ever hug a lobster, if you meet one on the street,
But run away and hope your frenzied feet are very fleet!
Options Underwater: The Song of the First Amphibian
by Michael R. Burch
“Evolution’s a Fishy Business!”
1.
Breathing underwater through antiquated gills,
I’m running out of options. I need to find fresh Air,
to seek some higher Purpose. No porpoise, I despair
to swim among anemones’ pink frills.
2.
My fins will make fine flippers, if only I can walk,
a little out of kilter, safe to the nearest rock’s
sweet, unmolested shelter. Each eye must grow a stalk,
to take in this green land on which it gawks.
3.
No predators have made it here, so I need not adapt.
Sun-sluggish, full, lethargic—I’ll take such nice long naps!
The highest form of life, that’s me! (Quite apt
to lie here chortling, calling fishes saps.)
4.
I woke to find life teeming all around—
mammals, insects, reptiles, loathsome birds.
And now I cringe at every sight and sound.
The water’s looking good! I look Absurd.
5.
The moral of my story’s this: don’t leap
wherever grass is greener. Backwards creep.
And never burn your bridges, till you’re sure
leapfrogging friends secures your Sinecure.
Related pages:
Best Poem of All Time,
Best Poets,
Best Lyric Poetry,
Best Free Verse,
Best Love Poetry,
Best Romantic Poetry,
Best Sad/Dark Poetry,
Best Religious Poetry,
Best Spiritual Poetry,
Best Heretical Poetry,
Best Poetry Translations,
Best Old English Poetry,
Best Epigrams,
Best Fall/Autumn Poetry,
Best Haiku,
Best Hiroshima Poetry,
Best Holocaust Poetry,
Best Anti-War Poetry,
Best of the Masters,
The Most Beautiful Poems in the English Language,
Best Poems for Kids,
Best Nonsense Verse,
Best Rondels and Roundels,
Best American Poetry
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