“This poetic form ever-thrifty, /
With rhyme scheme predictable-nifty, /
Here yields jubilant frame /
Via element’s name: /
Tin-tinnabulation! Post fifty!”
The 2 April 2026 poem was also my fiftieth Bluesky-specific post, which seemed to merit a bit of celebration. Tin, as the element with atomic number 50, likewise seemed a logical theme on which to begin building the poem.
(The title of this post echoes the poem’s link to “tintinnabulation” that I’ll explore below, but it also refers to a documented behavior of tin when it is bent. As with many topics I write about here, I had not encountered the latter, despite spending my career in chemistry, until drafting this essay and exploring some broader links.)
“This poetic form ever-thrifty, /
With rhyme scheme predictable-nifty…”
I remember the weekend in March 2019 when I contemplated starting the NaPoWriMo routine in the following month. I had never shared my non-academic writing publicly, although I enjoyed the practice. I had noticed that I was jotting down more and more limericks, with their “ever-thrifty” five-line format and “predictable-nifty” AABBA rhyme schemes. Once I realized I had a list of thirty, it seemed worth a try.
“Here yields jubilant frame /
Via element’s name: /
Tin-tinnabulation! Post fifty!”
This is a characteristic post for me in that it grew out of a fun similarity between words, then quickly became more complex than I expected.
“Tintinnabulation” is a wonderful word but doesn’t fit in the meter of a limerick as is. (Famously, it fits in the meter of a much more renowned poem by Edgar Allan Poe.) Limericks rely on anapests and amphibrachs, which fit two short syllables in between long syllables in slightly different ways. However, when I hyphenated the longer word, to keep the first “tin” distinct, it worked reasonably well; I read the fifth line as “tin; TINN-a-bu-LA-tion; post FIF-ty.”
Tin (via a complex path through Latin’s “stannum,” which also explains tin’s non-intuitive chemical symbol of Sn) seems distinct from tintinnabulation (via the Latin for “bells”), in terms of what I can quickly find online for etymologies. That said, it might bear noting that bells typically consist partially of tin.
As with many of these essays, a quick April rhyme resulted in an autumn detour that deserves much more attention than 280 words… but I’ll get this posted for today. This resource is fascinating, and I hope to revisit it soon.
Chemphasis 