The Use of a Goose

Here's what else I've heard about nursery rhymes, just off the top of my head: Ring Around the Rosie is about the Plague, and 'ashes ashes we all fall down' brings to mind the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the crier goes up and down the street calling “Bring out your dead!” Ashes? Think Ash Wednesday. Think funerary urns. "Fall down?" Think of your final bow to Mistress Gravity.Also, tradition has it that Hey Diddle Diddle conveyed the gossip at court during the reign of Elizabeth I, the cay being the regent herself and spoon and the dish referring to two of her royal retainers (her official taster and her chief "dresser" who allegedly eloped.) Then of course the cow jumping over the moon stands for Ben and Jerry's ice cream.I used to teach a course in the uses of fantastical tales whose curriculum I got to write. "Fantasy in Literature" it was called and we did spend a day or two on nursery rhymes. In fact I am holding on my lap now the densely footnoted-book about them that I used in the preparation of that syllabus. The Annotated Mother Goose has the following nursery rhyme on page 13 6 and 137. I offer it for its pleasingly frisky lilt, to divert and delight us all midway through this rainy May week. Maybe I should have brought it to the pond where I met these geese today and read it aloud to them just to get a reaction. Neither of the two adult birds was wearing an apron but you never do know when Old Mother G. might step out incognito.

Now for this pleasing little chant:

Needles and ribbons and packets of pins,

Prints and chintz and odds bod-a-kins-

They'd never mind whether

You laid them together

Or one from the other in packets and tins.

But packets and tins and ribbons and needles

And odd bod-a-kins and chintz and prints

Being birds of a feather

Would huddle together

Like minnows in billows or pennies in mints.

Yup, just the thing for this rainy day. Internal rhyme even! Believe I'm feeling better already.  :-)