The Listing Attic by Edward Gorey.
Title: The Listing Attic.
Author: Edward Gorey.
Genre: Fiction, poetry, humour.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1954.
Summary: A book of limericks as dark, witty, morbid, and astute as one can always expect from Gorey's poetry!
My rating: 9/10.
♥ A headstrong young woman in Ealing
Threw her two weeks’ old child at the ceiling;
When quizzed why she did,
She replied, ‘To be rid
Of a strange, overpowering feeling.’
♥ There was a young woman whose stammer
Was atrocious, and so was her grammar;
But they were not improved
When her husband was moved
To knock out her teeth with a hammer.
♥ To a weepy young woman in Thrums
Her betrothed remarked, ‘This is what comes
Of allowing your tears
To fall into my ears -
I think they have rotted the drums.’
♥ There was a young woman named Plunnery
Who rejoiced in the practice of gunnery,
Till one day unobservant,
She blew up a servant,
And was forced to retire to a nunnery.
♥ An innocent maiden named Herridge
Was cruelly tricked into marriage;
When she later found out
What her spouse was about,
She threw herself under a carriage.
♥ Some Harvard men, stalwart and hairy,
Drank up several bottles of sherry;
In the Yard around three
They were shrieking with glee:
‘Come on out, we are burning a fairy!’
♥ An Edwardian father named Udgeon,
Whose offspring provoked him to dudgeon,
Used on Saturday nights
To turn down the lights,
And chase them around with a bludgeon.
♥ Each night Father fills me with dread
When he sits on the foot of my bed;
I’d not mind that he speaks,
In gibbers and squeaks,
But for seventeen years he’s been dead.
♥ There was a young curate whose brain
Was deranged from the use of cocaine;
He lured a small child
To a copse dark and wild,
Where he beat it to death with his cane.
♥ A timid young woman named Jane
Found parties a terrible strain;
With movement uncertain
She’d hide in a curtain
And make sounds like a rabbit in pain.
♥ Said a girl who upon her divan
Was attacked by a virile young man:
‘Such excess of passion
Is quite out of fashion’
And she fractured his wrist with her fan.
♥ A lady who signs herself ‘Vexed’
Writes to say she believes she’s been hexed:
‘I don’t mind my shins
Being stuck full of pins,
But I fear I am coming unsexed.’
♥ A nurse motivated by spite
Tied her infantine charge to a kite;
She launched it with ease
On the afternoon breeze,
And watched till it flew out of sight.