Will anybody answer that poor Old Man’s bell in the bottom right illustration? 
The reiterating or echoing effect of Lear’s repeated rhyme-words often maintains and enhances the feeling of nonsense, leaving the limerick subjects in a perpetual state of suspended animation. 
Illustrations reaffirm the spirit of the text and have the capacity to set the nonsense-text into concrete. 
Drawing the selected moment of action in the very brief plot has the added effect of imprisoning the limerick subject within a particular point in time for an eternity.