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What Mother Goose Neglected to Mention
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A Soup Spoon Reflects upon His Past
So the dish ran away with the spoon, we were told,
__And he treated her well, bless his soul,
But he realized, when he was tarnished and old,
__That he should’ve run off with the bowl.
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How Things Might Have Turned Out Different
__Hey diddle diddle,
__When Teddy was little
The cow danced a jig with the stork;
__When the little boy coughed
__He went sailing aloft,
And the dish ran away with the fork.
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Prospective Matches
Foofarah foofaroo, this monogamous crew
__Knows that flatware should marry for life,
But the saucers and cups, who are bound by prenups,
__Wonder who will elope with the knife.
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Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah
—after Disney’s Song of the South
If people ask me why I must complain
When plenty of bright sunshine lights my path,
I tell them that we sorely need some rain,
That they should hunker down and do the math.
No bluebird sits on anybody’s shoulder,
And Remus dozes near the catfish pond
While Rabbit every day is getting bolder
And Fox of my young hens has grown quite fond.
I won’t begrudge a predator a meal
Or keep an interloper from its lunch,
But not until I punish those that steal
Will any changes happen, is my hunch.
I’ve no connection to a tar baby
That might prevent me from slipping away.
Someday I’ll wish upon a star, maybe,
And happily sing out zip-a-dee-ay.
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C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden. Hundreds of his poems have appeared in scores of print and electronic journals out of North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Australia and India. His collection, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.
Those small pieces on a single Mother Goose rhyme prove to me that a solid knowledge of nursery rhymes, learned and recited over and over again in childhood, is an indispensable requirement for future skill in composing traditional English poetry.
It isn’t so much the rhymes. It’s the rhythm and the stresses, the sing-song repetition, the sometimes absurd concatenations of imagery and ideas. A child will pick these things up immediately and they will go into his brain and become the “licensed zone of hyper-reality” that is the impregnable interior citadel of poetic creativity.
Look at the nursery rhyme that Kip Anderson is working off:
Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle —
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such a sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
Meaningless? Maybe — but not to a child. It is a little world of strange possibility and comic fun. Metrically confused? Not really — it makes use of dactyls and anapests but mixes them with other feet here and there. It’s like a child making little statues out of wet sand at the beach. They may be lumpish and out of proportion — but maybe he will grow up to be a sculptor like Michelangelo.
The second poem brings me back to that wonderful Disney film “Song of the South” (which now can’t be shown for left-wing political reasons). “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” became so popular that almost everybody was whistling the tune throughout America.
I’ve always heard/learned that there was a basis in fact for many of the Mother Goose poems. In this one, the cutlery were servants in the kitchen of the king, and they were fooling around. In Georgie Porgie, it was one King George, who acted out with girls, but had issues being manly enough. Coming up with rhymes was a way of gossiping without getting called out for it, which could be disastrous for the speaker.
Of course, some were probably just what they seemed.
To fully understand your point, Nancy, one needs only to watch Downton Abbey.
Good point, C.B. Of course, I watched Downton Abbey!
As Calvert Watkins laid out in his course on Indo-European Poetics, Joseph, as simple a nursery jingle as “Oats, peas, beans and barley grow” prefigures every key phonic element of poetry to come, namely alliteration, assonance and rhyme. I am certainly indebted to my mother for constantly reading me nursery rhymes when I was very young. It all adds up. Contrary to what some people might think, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” is not a nonsense phrase; it is an expression of happiness. The goddam liberals ruin everything.
I used to rewrite children’s Christmas songs for my grandkids, when they were very young. Here is an example (sung to the tune of the original song):
Frosty the Showman
Frosty the showman,
He loves to dance and sing.
A snowman in the winter
But he melted in the spring.
Frosty the showman,
He’s an actor and a clown.
With a black hat and a carrot nose,
He rolls all around the town.
Frosty the showman,
He’s the star of his own show,
So he moved to California
Where there’s hardly any snow.
Frosty the showman,
Wants to go back home again,
So that he can be a snowman
For his friends Rachael and Ben.
(And I had some other ones, such as Rudolph the Blue Nosed Reindeer.)
I’m not trying to rewrite the original, D.P.; I’m trying to amplify it for an adult readership. Long live Frosty!
It was our old nursery rhymes, as was the case with MANY other poets, that led me to jump at the chances, in elementary school, to scribble up something metered & ‘rhymey’. Searching for ‘perfect’ rhymes (to impress me English teachers) also helped me to win many a spelling bee. Now I’m so smart it scares me! -:) 2 fun reads, Kip.
It’s obvious, Mark, once you see it. You should have heard some of the jingles we naughty boys composed and sang on the way home from school. The cleanest of them went like this:
Joy to the world, the Lord has come,
Marching to the beat of the big bass drum.
Smart is good — don’t be ascairt. It doesn’t take much to impress an English teacher nowadays.
Lighthearted whimsy for a change! A nice compliment to the originals!
Everyone, James, needs to take a break from seriousness now and then. A “compliment” but also a complement. Nobody is completely original.
I loved these nursery rhymes that took me back to a time when my mother also read to me as a young child, and I became enamored with them. SCP published my version of “Humpty Dumpty” several years ago. I really enjoyed your sense of rhyme and rhythm along with how you reconceived the originals.
Strangely enough, Roy, the rhymes we heard in the nursery live in us still.
C.B., I love every single one of these and laughed out loud at “Prospective Matches” – a deftly wrought hoot of a poem. My grandmother used to sing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” to me, and your version is a grin-inducing gem. The rhyme “tar baby / star, maybe” is a stroke of poetic genius.
Heh heh, Susan. If I’m lucky, my poems will make it to the proscribed list. That rhyme is a crossover rhyme; it refers to another Disney production, Pinocchio.
These are truly enjoyable gems, C.B., which bring childhood memories into the slightly sardonic full flowering of middle age. Your Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah is my favorite not just for your fun take on Disney’s now-canceled “Song of the South” (along with a nice little Pinocchio allusion) but because of the wry way you throw water on the (arguably) mindless optimism represented by such a zippy song. That you stick it to woke Disney and revive interest in something it would rather forget is a huge bonus.
Just be careful, Brian, not to wish upon a tar baby, ‘less you wanna end up in the briar patch. And don’t whistle while you work.
See-saw, Margery Daw,
Mother Goose breaks nine tenths of the law,
And old Jack Sprat can’t fill his maw,
But you, Kip, keep poets in awe.
As you know, Margaret, small things matter as much as big things. I get the impression that you liked what you read.
What’s that proverb about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery? Doesn’t say the imitation has to be particularly good.