h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

British performance poet Henry Normal once said. “the limerick is the busy man’s sonnet.’

I take this to mean he was referring to the “volta”, the section typical off the sonnet where the theme goes off at a tangent. For instance, Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” starts off by describing the beauty of the flowers out in the countryside, and then (in the volta) goes on to talk about the undying memory of the daffodils “that flash upon that inward eye that is the bliss of solitude”.

Generally in limericks the volta is smutty. It starts off reasonably clean:

There was a young lady from Exeter
So lovely that men craned their necks at her

Then the volta turns dirty:

And one was so brave
As to actually wave
The distinguishing mark of his sex at her.

Using the same word at the end of the first and last lines made it hard for Edward Lear to introduce a volta. But then, some of Shakespeare’s sonnets don’t have them either.

The Japanese haiku can have a similar “gear change” (presumably for even busier people):

In the policeman’s arms, the lost child
Points towards the sweet shop.