I like limericks. They don't pretend to be great poetry. Many of them are bawdy, poking fun at what was the nature of our lives.

The limerick reflects the temper of its day. Limericks have been ascribed to such authors as Alford Lord Tennyson, Eugene Field, Don Marquire, Heywood Brown and Woodrow Wilson.

Edward Lear, back in the 1860s wrote these five-line ditties for children, but soon bounded out of the nursery onto the campus.

The more pungent, punchy, and bawdy, the more easily these verses were remembered and more frequently quoted.

Here a few limericks that have become accepted by scholars:

There was an old party Lyme

Who married three wives at one time

When asked, "Why the third?"

He replied, "One's absurd,

And bigamy, Sir, is a crime."

A damsel, seductive and handsome,

Got wedged in a sleeping room transom.

When offered much gold

For release, she was told

That the view was worth more than the ransom.

A baritone star of Havana

Slipped horribly on a banana;

He was sick for a year,

Then resumed his career

As a promising lyric soprano.

There's a notable family named Stein,

There's Gertrude, there's Ep, and there's Ein.

Gert's prose is the bunk,

Ep's sculpture is junk

And no one can understand Ein!

There was a young lady named Hall

Wore a newspaper dress to a ball.

The dress caught on fire

And burned her entire

Front page, sporting section, and all.

There was an old lady name Bryde

Who ate a green apple and died;

The apple fermented

Inside the lamented

And made cider inside her insides.

There was a miss who had a hernia

Who said to her doctor, "Goldernia,

When improving my middle

Be sure you don't fiddle

With matter's that do not concernia!"

A collegiate damsel named Breeze,

Weighed down by B.A.'s and Ph.D.'s,

Collapsed from the strain,

Alas, it was plain,

She was killing herself by degrees.

There was a young fellow named Hall

Who fell in a spring in the fall.

'Twould've been a sad thing

Had he died in the spring,

But he didn't--he died in the fall.

There was a young lady of Flint

Who had a most horrible squint;

She could scan the whole sky

With her uppermost eye,

While the other was reading small print.

Dr. A.O. Goldsmith of Kennett is a retired director of the School of Journalism, Louisiana State University.