“This National Chem Week draws near its brink.
This year’s celebrations passed in a blink.
We’ve seen metals marv’lous
(And heard some rhymes ard’ous)
In heralding species from ‘Ac to Zinc.’”
The 26 October 2019 limerick commemorated the end of National Chemistry Week 2019.
“This National Chem Week draws near its brink. /
This year’s celebrations passed in a blink.”
It was an interesting challenge to think of several metal-themed poems for National Chemistry Week 2019. With a few, as with this one, the rhyme scheme was retrosynthesized from the target of a specific metal’s name in the final line: working in reverse to frame the structure of the limerick around that end goal.
As described further below, this was a poem in which the rhymes were somewhat forced and the lines required some chemical shorthand to properly fit. The title here thus provides both a discussion of this particular writing process and an acknowledgement that this entry, along with much of this website, could be read as “re: verse engineering”: regarding the structuring of these brief poems.
“We’ve seen metals marv’lous /
(And heard some rhymes ard’ous) /
In heralding species from ‘Ac to Zinc.’”
The end of the limerick highlighted the general theme of 2019’s National Chemistry Week (“Marvelous Metals”) while acknowledging that this theme often led to language that was more awkward than elegant. In lines three and four, “marvelous” and “arduous” relied on elision to fit into their assigned rhyme scheme. Line five necessitated a stylistic mismatch with respect to the chemistry content, in highlighting metals as a category in their entirety: from start to finish; from stem to stern; from A to Z. “From ‘Ac to Zinc’” was used as a metallic variation on this last phrase, using the chemical symbol for actinium and the element name of zinc, for the alphabetical start and near-finish of the metals on the periodic table. (Zinc is more rhyme-friendly than the metal in the final alphabetical position, zirconium!)
Chemphasis 