Week 13 Reading: English Nursery Rhymes, Part A

Image on Wikimedia

This week, I read the English Nursery Rhymes unit. I chose these tales because I knew that I would find poems from my childhood that I wished to revisit as well as poems that I had never read before. Many of these poems were smaller than the size of a normal paragraph, and some were as little as two lines long. The unit is separated into sections like Tales, Proverbs, Riddles, Paradoxes, Games, etc. I like this format, because the large book of nursery rhymes that I had when I was a child just threw everything together.

The Tales section were more bizarre stories about anything, commonplace or not. Here, you will find tales about three men going to sea in a bowl, two little children perishing in a wood, and even more famous poems such as The Man in the Moon and Simple Simon. I liked revisiting the poem There Was a Crooked Man because I realized that a song that I love by Charlotte Gainsbourg called “Greenwich Mean Time” uses lines from it.

The Proverbs sections included life lessons, warnings, and suspicions. A particular poem without a title really stuck with me because I realized what good advice it was:

FOR every evil under the sun,
There is a remedy, or there is none.
If there be one, try and find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

I think that I will try to apply the lesson in this little poem to my daily outlook on life.

I found the Riddle section to be very amusing, but also difficult. I have always loved riddles and thought that it would be fun to try some of the ones in this unit. They were hard to figure out, though, as many of them were everyday objects or well-known things such as sunshine or a pair of tongs, and they were described in ways that I would never have imagined. For example:

AS soft as silk, as white as milk,
As bitter as gall, a thick wall,
And a green coat covers me all.

The object that this riddle is describing is a walnut! Perhaps these riddles were easier for people to figure out when this book was compiled in 1897.

For this week’s storytelling, I may try writing some of my own riddles or nursery rhymes.

If you would like to read these tales, click here: link.

Lang, Andrew. The Nursery Rhyme Book. 1897.