![]() The Opies point out a more lighthearted possibility: in Dutch folklore, gifted children are said to be able to laugh roses. For starters, it appeared 200 years too late in Kate Greenaway's 1881 edition of Mother Goose. Folklorists like Iona and Peter Opie, who penned the Oxford English Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, doubt the grim connection. Begin with all players holding hands and facing each other (in a ring). The exact words vary, as is true of all playground rhymes, but this is the version with which I'm most familiar. It is also a common children's game, at least in the US. Other versions replace "ashes" with "a-tishoo!" to represent another symptom of the disease: sneezing. Ring-around-the-roses is, as mentioned in the OP, a nursery rhyme. The "ring-a-roses" refers to a rosy rash, the "pocket full of posies" is the handful of herbs and other spices used to ward of disease and the "ashes" are the cremated remains of the dead. Over 20 percent of London's population was wiped out by the Great Plague and the rhyme supposedly describes the victim's onset of symptoms and subsequent death. Image: Ring a Ring a Roses by Myles Birket Foster (1825–1899), via Wikimedia Commons.One of the most popular interpretations of "Ring Around the Rosie" - originally called "Ring o' Roses" - links the lyrics to the bubonic plague that struck England in 1665 (or possibly even the first outbreak of the Black Death in the 1300s). ![]() 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. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, and posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. 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: Have you heard of the nursery rhymes scary histories Learn about the Ring Around the Rosie creepy origin, AKA Ring a Ring a Rosie. 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. ![]() 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’). Interpreters have associated the rhyme with the 1665 Great Plague of. Of all the alleged nursery rhyme backstories, the one behind this quatrain is the most confounding. 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. Pocket full of posies, Ashes, ashes, We all fall down Ring Around the Rosie is a famous folk song and nursery rhyme that first appeared in print in 1881.
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