At Metafilter, a link to some Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks. The only one that strikes me as worth repeating:
I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud
There once was a poet named Will
Who tramped his way over a hill
And was speechless for hours
Over some stupid flowers
This was years before TV, but still.
There are some good efforts at the Metafilter link. [And some terrible ones. There’s something particularly annoying about limericks which don’t scan properly. It’s not that hard to get right.]
My contribution: Gray’s Elegy
A churchyard’s the best place to be
to think about, well, the big D.
It comes to us all,
Fat, thin, short or tall,
The ploughman, John Milton….and me.
I remember a correspondence in the London Review of Books, back when I used to read it, about whether the limerick was translatable to other languages. I think the consensus was no, it wasn’t, though a couple of French efforts were quoted. Whether that’s because of the particular phrasing and rhythm of English, or because of that whole poetry eh? whew, that’s a bit pompous! let’s have a larf about it attitude characteristic of the English and culture, I don’t know. You certainly wouldn’t want serious limericks. Especially not in German.
Mick Hartley 
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