Three Hundred New, New, New Limericks

By Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly

This is a compilation of three hundred limericks, all of which are original.
Each one is numbered. After some of them a short commentary has been attached to explain features of the limerick – to any allusion in it which is not obvious, or to places mentioned, or to explain pronunciations which might be unclear, or to explain words which are unusual. The metre of each verse is indicated by using bold type for the stressed syllables.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly
• Release date: Jan 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311755834

Book preview

Three Hundred New, New, New Limericks

By Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly

Copyright 2015 Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly

Smashwords Edition

COPYRIGHT: This book should not really be copied without the permission of Mr. Jackson-Firefly as he is living in dire poverty, subsisting on a crust of stale bread and two cups of sugarless and milkless tea a day, and he relies on the income from this collection of his verses to keep his larder stocked with the aforementioned stale bread and tea and empty packets of sugar and empty bottles of milk.

The Editor.

COVER TEXT.

Three Hundred New, New, New Limericks / Readers’ Comments: / It’s a fine book indeed (E. J-F.) / These limericks are the work of a genius (E. J-F.) / Another good buy…. From Jackson-Firefly (E. J-F.) / Three hundred? That’s one a day from January 1 until September 26 (in a leap year) (E. J-F.) / There was a young fellow from Crete… / If I hadn’t written it myself I’d buy it (E. J-F.) / They’re new, new, new (E. J-F.) / Buy it now, now, now (E. J-F.) / I hope it’s goodbye… From Jackson-Firefly (A rival limerick writer) / Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly / An owl, a cat and a dog… / A sprightly old lady from Kent… / One day in the middle of spring… / A bus on its way to Long Sutton…

LIST OF CONTENTS:

LIMERICKS 1-100

LIMERICKS 101-200

LIMERICKS 201-300

INTRODUCTION

This is a collection of three hundred original limericks by the author Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly. They (almost) all scan and rhyme and some contain nuggets of wisdom, or interesting observations on the world around us peopled by ‘a patient from Burnham-on-Crouch’ or ‘a man of one-hundred–and-three’ or ‘a fellow in far-off Japan’. There are locations such as ‘the Gloucestershire city of Gloucester’ and ‘down far away in the valley’ and ‘a castle on top of a rock’. There are incidents explained – ‘one day when I went into town’, and ‘one day I was rudely awoken’. There are reflections – ‘I was once at the top, but fell off’, and advice - ‘if you run out of inspiration…’.

And that’s it. The limericks are followed by short commentaries by Mr. Jackson-Firefly’s amanuensis and scribe B.T. (perhaps better known as Boswell Tertius) which may or may not be interesting or useful or necessary. Some are happy, some are tragic. Some are good, most are bad.

The Editor (i.e. me again, B.T.).

c/o A Shack in a Small Wood, Denaby Ings. 9 March 2019.

LIMERICKS 1-100

001

There was a young fellow from Stoke

Who dressed up as a fly for a joke.

His short-sighted wife

Put an end to his life

With fly-spray she killed the poor bloke.

Stoke in England is usually Stoke-on-Trent (less commonly, Stoke-upon-Trent), a city in the county of Staffordshire in the west midlands of England. There are some fifty other places called Stoke in England. The name is from Old English (a place; a religious place). It is a useful place name for rhymes.

Wikipedia (27-02-2019) has a helpful list of the places called Stoke in England.

Some are standalones – that is, simply ‘Stoke’. These are: Stoke (Cheshire), Stoke (Coventry, Warwickshire), Stoke (Hayling Island, Hampshire), Stoke (Kent), Stoke (Plymouth), Stoke (a suburb of Ipswich, Suffolk).

The rest have a differentiating tag attached (e.g. Stoke Gabriel ) or ‘Stoke’ qualifies some following element (e.g. Stoke Heath).

They are: Stoke Abbott (Dorset), Stoke Aldermoor (Coventry - also nearby Stoke Park), Stoke Ash (Norfolk), Stoke Bardolph (Nottinghamshire), Stoke Bishop (Bristol), Stoke Bliss (Herefordshire), Stoke Bruerne (Northamptonshire), Stoke by Clare (Suffolk), Stoke Canon (Devon), Stoke Charity (Hampshire), Stoke Climsland (Cornwall), Stoke d'Abernon (Surrey), Stoke Doyle (Northamptonshire), Stoke Dry (Rutland), Stoke Edith (Herefordshire), Stoke Ferry (Norfolk), Stoke Fleming (Devon), Stoke Gabriel (Devon), Stoke Gifford (Bristol), Stoke Golding (Leicestershire), Stoke Goldington (Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire), Stoke Hammond (Buckinghamshire), Stoke Heath (an area in the south of Bromsgrove, Worcestershire), Stoke Heath (a suburb in the north of Coventry, Warwickshire), Stoke Heath (Shropshire), Stoke Holy Cross (Norfolk), Stoke Lacy (Herefordshire), Stoke Lyne (Oxfordshire), Stoke Mandeville (Buckinghamshire), Stoke Newington (London), Stoke next Guildford (Surrey), Stoke on Tern (Shropshire), Stoke Orchard (Gloucestershire), Stoke Poges (Buckinghamshire), Stoke Pound (Worcestershire), Stoke Prior (Herefordshire), Stoke Prior (Worcestershire), Stoke Rivers (Devon), Stoke Rochford (Lincolnshire), Stoke Row (Berkshire), Stoke Row (Oxfordshire), Stoke St Gregory (Somerset), Stoke St Mary (Somerset), Stoke St Michael (Somerset), Stoke St. Milborough (Shropshire), Stoke Talmage (Oxfordshire), Stoke Trister (Somerset), Stoke-by-Nayland (Suffolk), Stoke-on-Trent ( Staffordshire), Stoke-sub-Hamdon (Somerset).

002

An innocent man in a jail

With no hope of obtaining bail

Went into a sewer

With sea-bound manure

And escaped on the back of a whale.

The escape was an ingenious solution to his problem, and it seems that the whale was sympathetic to his plight. If you are not a criminal you might not know that bail is a sum of money paid for release from jail until an appearance in a court, and is eventually returned to the payer. But it is not returned if the person in question fails to attend the court.

The origin is Latin BĀIULUS (= a carrier, a porter) > BĀIULĀRE (= to carry) > Old French BAILLIER (= to hand over, to deliver) > Middle English BAIL (= hand over (a prisoner) into the custody of somebody else who has given money as security to the imprisoner) > (the money which is paid for the release of the prisoner from prison).

A rather needless explanation since the escaped convict no longer needs to apply for bail.

003

An artist who travelled from Penge

To paint the great stones of Stonehenge

Didn’t remember

It’s cold in December

And so he went back home to Penge.

Interesting Facts: Penge is a suburb of south-east London in the London Borough of Bromley. In the popular mind it is the archetypal London commuter suburb.

Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument consisting of a circle of standing stones located in Wiltshire, England, 3 km west of the village of Amesbury and 13 km north of the city of Salisbury. It was constructed from 3000 BC to 2000 BC.

The distance between Penge and Stonehenge is 126km as the crow flies, or 162km by road.

The average December temperature in Stonehenge is 5º Celsius (variation: 2.2º - 7.8º), and in Penge the average daytime temperature in December is 7º.

004

A man of a hundred and two

Now lives with his friends in a zoo -

Seven snakes and a bear

And a white Alpine hare

And a pair of cockatoos too.

The centenarian had eleven friends, it seems, and he preferred the company of these animal pals and elected to live alongside them in a zoo.

005

Two awful old bores in a pub

From a famous philosophy club.

Both bored each other

So stiff that one’s brother

Had to take each one home in a tub.

Tubs and philosophers seem to go together. In Athens, Diogenes of Sinope [daɪˈɒdʒɪniːz əv səˈnoʊpɪ] (c. 412—c.323 B.C.) took to living in a tub, or PITHOS in Greek, in the Metroön, a building dedicated to the mother goddess Demeter [dɪˈmiːtə], apparently after watching a mouse and realising he had no need for a conventional abode.

006

An artist whose surname was Mallory

Was employed by a prestigious gallery.

The paintings there viewed

Were awfully rude

So a judge fined him ten times his salary.

Mallory is an English surname of Norman origin, and is from the Norman-French noun MALEUR (= misfortune, bad luck) from (MAL = bad) + (EUR = fortune), from Latin AUGURIUM (= augury). It was a nickname for an unfortunate man.

007

A man who drank gallons of beer

Decided to stop for a year.

The brew’ries protested

And he was arrested

And now he’s in jail near here.

Doctors advise the population to cut down on their consumption of alcohol in the interest of good health and of avoiding debilitating disease and death. But it seems that the advice, though well-meaning, could cause a reformed drinker to risk a spell in a prison. If this limerick is based on a real-life incident, that is.

008

A dog that slept on a bed

Rolled off it and fell on its head.

The vet said,