While sonnets have their devotees, too few
Respect the limerick as poetry,
While citing violations of taboo,
As if perdition came from childish glee.
Transgression, true, is in the poem’s soul,
To laugh at human idiosyncrasies,
And mock the powers seeking to control
Behavior and enforce morality.
And yet, when I take up my pen to write,
I can’t escape those lettered luminaries
Whose limericks both gladden and delight;
Sublimely silly, revolutionary.
Like Lear and Stoppard, see a trend and buck it,
Just like that cheeky fellow from Nantucket.
Libby Weber 
Clever! There once was a bulldog….
Thank you! There was a young fellow from Sparta… 😀
I gave a command performance of that Limerick the other day… 😀
I adore limericks, even though someone I know refers to them as “the dirty prison hand job of the poetry world” lol! After the Nantucket one, my favorite is the one about the two cats from Kilkenny 🙂
I adore Mr. Holmes’s 7-10 split: it reminds me of one of my favorites rude ones:
A lusty young Scotsman named Keith
Propositioned a lass on the heath.
He asked Agnes McClouth
For a bust in the mouth,
But she gave him a crack in the teeth.
But my all-time favorite one is more punny than rude:
There was a young fellow named Hall
Who fell in the spring in the fall.
T’would have been a sad thing
If he died in the spring,
But he didn’t- he died in the fall.