A Book and a Jug and a Dame

Anonymous, (1100 - 2010)

Original Text

William S. Baring-Gould, The Lure of the Limerick (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967): 142.

1A book and a jug and a dame,

2And a nice cozy nook for the same;

3 "And I don't care a damn,"

4 Said Omar Khayyam,

5"What you say, it's a great little game."

Notes

4] Omar Khayyam: from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward Fitzgerald (1859), a popular translation of a work by a 12th-century Persian poet. The limerick perfectly modernizes the happy cynicism of Fitzgerald's speaker:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
And Wilderness is Paradise enow. (XI: 41-44)

Back to Line

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

RPO 1999.

Rhyme

aabba

Form

limerick