Caveat: Poems #614 and #615

There once was Moby, a white whale
and some narrator named Ishmael
and these guys on a boat
that soon failed to float
with digressions, and prose that was stale.

– this is my own “retelling in limerick form” of a well-known work of literature, quite inspired by this post on the languagehat blog, in turn inspired by some discussion on a site called wordorigins. I spent a good hour browsing the comments and links for these two sites. Entertaining. My favorites, seen at those links:

There once was a girl named Lenore
And a bird and a bust and a door
And a guy with depression
And a whole lot of questions
And the bird always says “Nevermore”

… and:

“Utnapishtim,” cried Gilgamesh, “Why
Do you get to live, while I die?”
“I can see that you’re vexed,”
[There’s a gap in the text]
The walls of Uruk are quite high!

I also enjoyed this observation, by a commenter named Trond Engen:

“A limerick needs a dose of offbeacity or else it will often sound flat.”

That comment, in turn, inspired another work of my own:

If you want limericks to have a capacity
to show anything more than verbosity
and to thusly afford
some readers unbored
Then they'll need to include some offbeacity