É muito bom, mas o tema de old/young person acaba por se tornar repetitivo, quando acabou dei graças a Zeus.

Appropriately titled.

Though the repetition also makes it easy to start unconsciously skimming, I also like how hypnotic the repetition is, and the illustrations are great too.

The limericks in this book are undoubtedly delightful and addictive to read. The silliness of them will engage children who have perhaps not heard limericks before and Lear's illustrations also entertain.

What typifies Lear's limericks is that the first and last line are usually the same or at least end in the same word. I personally find this entertaining but mostly because it annoys my father to realms of such irritation I cannot stop reading them aloud! However, I do agree there is something slightly unsophisticated about the rhythm of the rhyme.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Lear's limericks for the first time in this book as they are charming in their simplicity. Reading this with children in a classroom setting would be fun and would certainly inspire some silly attempts in creating their own.

the content matches the title

Here are my blog comments about this book. I would love to hear answers to my questions at the end:

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

I thought it was nonsense.

Edward Lear's "Book of Nonsense" is a book about old men from random places who do random shit for no reason. It is the single greatest book ever written and you should read it now and die. If me and Steven Quartz Universe were on a desert island and had this book, we would fuck each other a lot. Frank Zappa says read this book.

IF you want to escape from the world of the mundane into the humorous look no further than picking up a copy of Edward Lear’s The Book of Nonsense and Nonsense Songs.
Lear was the inventor of the Limerick. The first time I read one was probably in 1964 or 1965 when I borrowed a friend’s English textbook which contained some of Mr Lear’s limericks. I immediately fell in love with them. Several decades later I started writing my own and thoroughly enjoyed doing so.

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The book is a compilation of two of Mr Lear’s books: The Book of Nonsense followed by Nonsense Songs. The first consists solely of limericks and the second of longer nonsense verses. Each limerick has a funny illustration right above it while each nonsense poem contains several sketches, not all of which are comical. The beautiful cover of the book has been taken from the limerick There was an Old Man of Corfu.
Lear travelled widely from Calabria to Corsica and from Italy to Illyna; from Egypt to Albania and from Greece to India. Sometimes you get the feeling that he is building amusing character sketches of people he actually met or at least saw during his travels. Or maybe they are just a figment of his imagination which he has no dearth of. Some limericks might make you laugh and some others might even make you roll on the floor like the following ones:
There was an Old Man with a beard
Who said, “It is just as I feared! -
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!”

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There was an Old Person of Rheims
Who was troubled with horrible dreams;
So to keep him awake,
They fed him on cake,
Which amused that old person of Rheims.

There was an old Person of Sparta,
Who had twenty-five sons and one “darter”;
He fed them on snails,
And weighed them in scales,
That wonderful person of Sparta.

We all know that ‘darter’ alludes to daughter. However, Mr Lear is not only coining darter to make it rhyme with Sparta but is also doing so to make the limerick more lighthearted. Or maybe he visited a certain place where the people pronounced daughter as darter. In the same way in another limerick he alludes to serpent as “sarpint.” The innovative word certainly tickles your bones.
Here is another one which I found to be extremely jocular:
There was an Old Lady of Chertsey,
Who made a remarkable curtsey;
She twirled round and round
Till she sank underground,
Which distressed all the people of Chertsey.

The British writer’s coinage of words and the stretching of his imagination will truly dazzle you. Spontaneous becomes sponge-taneous and “What is the matter” becomes “What matter?” In one of his limericks, he writes about a “cream-coloured ass” and you actually wish you could see one and maybe ride on it too.

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A sketch of Edward Lear during his youth.

During his life he suffered from depression and epilepsy, which is why you often get the feeling that his highly inventive verse had a melancholic undertone. The following are three examples of this:
There was an Old Man of the Cape
Who possessed a large Barbary Ape,
Till the ape one dark night
Set the house all alight,
Which burned that Old Man of the Cape.

There was a Young Lady of Clare,
Who was sadly pursued by a bear;
When she found she was tired,
She abruptly expired,
That unfortunate Lady of Clare.

There was an Old Person of Ems,
Who casually fell in the Thames;
And when he was found
They said he was drowned,
That unlucky Old Person of Ems.

You don’t laugh at a house set on fire or at the death of an Old Man who gets scorched. Neither do you make fun of a Young Lady who dies as a result of heart failure on being chased by a grizzly bear nor at the accidental death of an Old Person who dies as a consequence of drowning.
While writing about the attributes of Mr. Lear, John Ruskin said, “I really don’t know any author to whom I am half so grateful for my idle self as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors.”

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Mr. Lear abundantly uses adjectives, especially in the last line of each limerick, to emphasize the reaction on the protagonist of the poem. He keeps inventing nonsense words like runcible, ombliferous, etc. The first word appears, as an adjective, several times in his works, most famously as the “runcible spoon” used by the Owl and the Pussycat.
Nonsense Songs starts with The Owl and the Pussy-cat. It talks about the romance – I repeat romance– between an Owl and a Pussycat, entirely in verse. It is followed by poems like The Duck and the Kangaroo, The Daddy Long-Legs and The Fly and The Jumblies. Each has a story to tell and is thoroughly amusing in its own right.
The London-born writer uses alliteration and imagery throughout the book which makes it even more enjoyable.
A limerick is one of the few forms of poetry that entertains both children and adults. If you have not read any of Mr Lear’s books, then you should start off with this one right away.

Strange and funny plus the illustrations are fascinating.

When I was a child, I enjoyed Lear, but I read only a poem or two at a time. This book was "way too much of a good thing." If I ever read another "There was an old man from" or "There was an old person from" poem again, it will be too soon. He had several alphabets. Many used the same thing for the letters. For example, all used "Xerxes" for the letter "X." Why not a xylophone? In addition to poems and alphabets, Lear included some nonsensical biological drawings and a couple short stories. "The Owl and the Pussycat" is probably Lear's best-known work, and there's a reason for that. It's his best. Lear is best consumed in small doses, and this volume gives one entirely too much nonsense.

This one gets mixed reviews from me. I'm not sure why I put it on my TBR list, but I did, and I've read it. I'm glad to now know where "The Owl and The Pussycat" came from. Some of the poetry makes me want to read it aloud to someone. But as the title suggests, it's nonsense. The nonsensical nature of it wore thin rather quickly. I know that it's supposed to be nonsense, but it got old by the fourth or fifth poem.