There Was An Old Man With A Beard - Poem by Edward Lear

There Was An Old Man With A Beard is a limerick poem by Edward Lear from "The Book of Nonsense"

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.

Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, now known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.

As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes, and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.

In 1846 Lear published A Book of Nonsense, a volume of limericks which went through three editions and helped popularize the form and the genre of literary nonsense. In 1871 he published Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, which included his most famous nonsense song, The Owl and the Pussycat, which he wrote for the children of his patron Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. Many other works followed.

I hope you enjoy this video I have illustrated and animated of one of his famous limerick poems