The Fifth Line

By John Arthur Nichol

Edward Lear is known for the limericks in his ground-breaking work, A Book of Nonsense. They gave the limerick a popularity that endures to this day.
But his own verses threw away the limerick’s most important part - the twist in the final line that makes us chuckle.
Lear’s concern was Nonsense, a concept new to Victorian England. So he would establish a premise that was knowingly and joyfully absurd and, job done, his final line simply pointed back to the beginning.
To a modern eye, Lear’s poems are disappointing , because they don’t build up to anything. There’s no joke at the end. No twist. It’s pure let-down.
In The Fifth Line, John Arthur Nichol crafts a new limerick from the bones of every verse in A Book of Nonsense. His new verses include what we all expect from a limerick: a punch line. A sting in the tail. A chuckle at the end.
That's two hundred and twenty four limericks because, so that you can read the old and the new together, the book has Lear’s originals as well.
They're all here, from An Old Man With a Nose to A Young Lady Whose Bonnet, and everything in between.
If you've ever longed for the Old Man of Cape Horn to cheer up, or to rescue the Person of Cromer from his sudden and unexplained conclusion, or to silence that annoying Old Man with a Bell, then this is the book you've been waiting for.
Buy it now. Just for a laugh :)

Review Quotes:

Loved it!
Reedsy Discovery Reviewer.

“The Fifth line: Limericks After Lear is a fun little book of limericks.”
NetGalley Reviewer

“... I love reading limericks. They are funny, witty, and amusing. This book also embodies all these traits. The author has done a great job adapting the limericks and even made most of them better than the original.”
NetGalley Reviewer

“... I would happily recommend the book to all poetry lovers or to people that enjoy reading limericks.”
NetGalley Reviewer

“... So in this slender volume you get the original and the remake side by side to compare and decide which one you prefer. Plus some adorable black and white drawings.”
NetGalley Reviewer

“... Personally, I believe I liked the new versions more, they even made for an occasional laugh out loud moment. Though not like a proper laugh, more along the lines of a titter, snicker or a guffaw. But an adorable diversion, especially for fans of the jocular poetic art form that is a limerick.”
NetGalley Reviewer

“... A very quick read and a perfectly entertaining way to spend 35 minutes or so. Actually, I wish my brain was more awake right now, so I’d review this in a limerick format, but no...maybe at a later date. Yeah, fun was had. Recommended. Thanks NetGalley.”
NetGalley Reviewer

“... Yeah, fun was had. Recommended.”
NetGalley Reviewer

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Arthur Nichol
• Release date: Nov 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648905912

Book preview

Foreword

Edward Lear didn’t invent the limerick. But when he published A Book of Nonsense in 1846, he inspired many other writers to adopt the form, and the limerick has been a part of popular culture in every generation since.

Limericks have a defined form that is immediately familiar: five lines in a pattern of two long, two short, one long, with a rhyme shared by the long lines, and another rhyme shared by the short lines.

Limericks in this form existed well before Lear, and Lear cited, as the model for his own efforts, the following verse quoted to him by a friend:

There was an old man of Tobago,

Who lived upon rice, gruel and sago

Till, much to his bliss,

His physician said this -

‘To a leg, sir, of mutton you may go.’

This is a proper limerick, in every sense.

But Lear himself did not as a rule write proper limericks.

Lear threw away the most powerful feature of the form: the fifth line, where a limerick concludes with a twist and is rendered satisfactory.

Edward Lear discarded the fifth line in function, and he rejected it symbolically as well, by combining lines three and four, the short lines, into a single third line. The disabled fifth line then became the fourth, and Lear used it merely to repeat the essence of what he’d said in the first line (or occasionally the second).

There was an Old Person of Ischia,

Whose conduct grew friskier and friskier;

He danced hornpipes and jigs, and ate thousands of figs,

That lively Old Person of Ischia.

In The Fifth Line: Limericks After Lear, I mean after in the sense of inspired by or based upon.

Each of Lear’s verses from A Book of Nonsense, I’ve used as the starting point for a new limerick that reinstates the fifth line and restores its purpose.

For some verses I’ve developed several alternatives, in which case I’ve tried to select (and it’s often been a compromise) the version I think is the funniest, the best formed, and the one most suited to a general audience.

Some of Lear’s verses are difficult to adapt using his leading rhymes. Lear didn’t need three rhyming words for his long lines; he only needed two, since his last line would repeat the final word of the first. So while Lear could happily begin with …

There was an Old Lady of Chertsey …

it is all but impossible to turn that beginning into a proper limerick. There aren’t enough rhyming words. In cases like this, I’ve had to turn things around.

In some of my limericks I’ve remained close to Lear’s original premise, as established in