Lullabies and Nursery Rhymes

      According to the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature, the first verse written for children was religious verse, by people like John Bunyan and Isaac Watts.  But even earlier there was verse in the oral tradition which eventually got written down to form the familiar nursery rhymes many of us know by heart.  These poems began to be recorded in the 18^th century, but even after they were put into print continued to be part of oral traditions – and even some “newer” poems, specifically written for children, would be absorbed into oral tradition.

      Nursery rhymes are extremely memorable bits of verse that we learn so early in life that we generally cannot remember their source.  Many of these poems were not originally created for a child audience at all, but came out of various “adult” traditions – song verses, bits of old drinking songs, riddles, the cries of street vendors, games, etc.  The first written collection of children’s nursery rhymes was Tommy Thunder’s Song Book (c. 1744), although John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book appeared soon after.

 Lullabies

      Lullabies, in particular, are very old, probably originating almost as soon as song itself, as mothers sought to quiet their restless infants.  Lullabies typically come accompanied by a tune, which aids in the memory process; the tunes are gentle, quiet melodies that help promote the primary aim of these songs, to put babies to sleep.  The words are often somewhat hostile toward the child (fortunately the usual targets of lullabies cannot comprehend these words!) – from the relatively benign plaint that “Mammy and daddy have both gone away/And left nobody for to mind you” in “Go to Sleepy, Little Baby” to images of baby’s eyes being pecked out in various other cognates of “All the Pretty Little Horses” (1133), to outright threats in songs like “Baby, baby, naughty baby” (1134), which pictures Napoleon coming to first beat and then devour the misbehaving infant.  We can interpret the imagined injuries to the child in these poems in a couple of different ways – perhaps as a magical incantation to ward off the named evil?  Or perhaps an expression of the latent hostility the stressed-out parent or caregiver feels toward the child who just won’t go to sleep?  The latter concept is supported by songs like White’s “Lullaby of a Female Convict. . .” (1136), which is not hostile toward the child but clearly states the mother’s longing for her own rest.

      Eugene Field’s “Winken, Blinken, and Nod” is a lullaby that originates as a kind of a riddle, as the final verse makes clear by explicating the imagery of the preceding verses.

Nursery Rhymes

      Slightly older children learn to recite for themselves various nursery rhymes, whether from parents and nurses or from other children.  Commentators on nursery rhymes almost invariably note that everyone knows at least a few of these poems, which often appear nonsensical.  The apparent absence of sense has led to various speculations as to the possible meanings of nursery rhymes, most of which are wrong – as Iona and Peter Opie put it, “the bulk of these speculations are worthless” (25).

      Nursery rhymes are frequently associated with the name of “Mother Goose,” an entirely fictional character whose lack of reality has nevertheless not prevented people from trying to identify her with a historical person.  “Mother Goose” was already a familiar enough figure at the time of Charles Perrault to appear in the subtitle of his collection of fairy tales; Mother Goose’s Melody was the title of one of Newbery’s collections of nursery rhymes in the middle of the 18^th century, and “Mother Goose” has ever since been a convenient tag for mostly anonymous children’s verses. 

      Many of the nursery rhymes contain veiled or not-so-veiled reference to violent events; others have altered in the children’s oral tradition to obscure original bawdy references.  Most of all, nursery rhymes tend to offer puzzles: “Much of the ‘Mother Goose’ corpus consists of verses wrenched out of context, thereby acquiring a teasing nonsensical quality or a mystery that the original never had.” (Hunt 63)  Although some nursery rhymes may have had specific authors, even many of those for which the original source can be identified by scholars have become more or less anonymous for the ordinary reader – e.g., “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” which was written by British author Jane Taylor.

      Nodelman suggests that the easy slide into anonymity reflects the nature of nursery rhymes:

      . . .[T]hey are the kinds of words that get stuck in human minds, so that people can pull them out on those occasions when they need to say or sing something that sounds pleasant or just plain interesting.  Whatever their sources, then, people who found these verses easy to remember remembered them, and passed them on to others by word of mouth; and so, the poems became part of an oral tradition that cares much less for authorship than it does for memorability.   (184)

Among the features contributing to memorability are a strong sense of rhythm and rhyme, often intensified by fairly short lines that cause the rhyming words to recur frequently, and exaggerated language.  Additionally, Nodelman argues, Mother Goose rhymes have a strong element of the absurd – either in taking total impossibilities (like a cow jumping over the moon) for granted, or by conferring mock significance on fairly ordinary occurrences (like a little boy pulling a plum out of a plum pie).  The absurdity and the sound of nursery rhymes’ language produce pleasure in the hearer, and eliminate the need for them to “make sense.”

“Cradle Song” ("Hush-a-bye, baby, in the treetop") (1135)

      The Opies note that this is “the best-known lullaby both in England and America.”  It first appeared in Newbery’s Mother Goose’s Melody around 1765, although some authorities have suggested in originated in America.  The Opies give several rather complex and fanciful proposed derivations for the song. 

“Ride a Cock-Horse to Banbury Cross” (1139)

      There are various alternatives of this nursery rhyme.  The Opies give as the second line “To see a fine lady upon a white horse” – the language in the Norton Anthology is from an earlier version, dated 1784.  There’s also another rhyme with the same opening line but completely different content:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,

To buy little Johnny a galloping horse;

It trots behind and it ambles before,

And Johnny shall ride till he can ride no more.

The destination is also different in some versions – to Coventry Cross for the first variant, and to Shrewsbury Cross for the second.

SOURCES: Peter Hunt, Ed., Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999; Perry Nodelman, “The Nursery Rhymes of Mother Goose: A World Without Glasses” in Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children’s Literature, vol. 2, West Lafayette, IN: Children’s Literature Association, 1987, 183-201; Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, New Edition, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997; Jack Zipes, et al., The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature: The Traditions in English, New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.

A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD  57401

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