Image: Ring a Ring a Roses by Myles Birket Foster (1825–1899), via Wikimedia Commons. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. It’s better to retain a little mystery in these things.ĭiscover the stories behind more classic nursery rhymes with our analysis of ‘ London Bridge is Falling Down’, our commentary on the Little Bo Peep rhyme, our post delving into the history of the ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ nursery rhyme, and analysis of the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ rhyme. But maybe that’s actually more satisfying. This is less gripping, perhaps, than the interpretation which places the rhyme’s origins in the Great Plague, but most nursery rhymes elude such reductively simplistic explanations. Perhaps the ring of roses is simply a poetic description of the physical act of dancing in a circle (the children are the roses), they form a little ‘pocket’ of flowers by dancing in a ring, and then when the dance stops they curtsey: But perhaps it won’t do to over-analyse the rhyme and look for universal or coherent meaning in nursery rhymes, any more than it does when analysing the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll. MEANING OF ROSES The Rose is the flower whose meaning we most understand, but here are some details of the meaning of the Rose that may be of further interest. ![]() Is the song more about hay fever than plague? Perhaps. The dance ends with a curtsey or bow to the other participants, hence the falling down, while the sneezing may be linked to the flowers. Eliot’s description of Tudor folk dancing round and round the bonfire in ‘East Coker’, or another famous rhyme, ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’). ![]() But what these rhymes all have in common is that they centre on children holding hands and dancing round in a circle or ring, something that is part of many ancient cultures (consider T.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |