“Limericks are short poems of five lines having rhyme structure AABBA. It is officially described as a form of ‘anapestic trimeter’.
The ‘anapest’ is a foot of poetic verse consisting of three syllables, the third longer (or accentuated to a greater degree) than the first two: da-da-DA. The word ‘anapest’ shows it’s own metric: anaPEST.
Lines 1, 2 and 5 of a limerick should ideally consist of three anapests each, concluding with an identical or similar phoneme to create the rhyme.
Lines 3 and 4 are shorter, constructed of two anapests each and again rhyming with each other with the overall rhyme structure of AABBA.”
The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
Hardly ever are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.