2700. For no rhyme or reason

(As some of you will know, when a round number is reached in these story numberings, there is usually a departure from the norm and a flurry into the almanacs of the past).

Academics will tell you that children’s nursey rhymes have profound and often dark origins. As a child I didn’t care that “Ring a Ring a Rosy” was about the Black Plague, and “Little Jack Horner” was about the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. I loved nursey rhymes because of the rhythm and rhyme. I guess most of us did.

But there were other rhymes that weren’t necessarily traditional nursey rhymes. Some of them were favourites and often recited.

My all-time favourite was:

One-One was a race horse.
Two-Two was one too.
One-One won one race.
Two-Two won one too.

Then there was:

Fuzzy-Wuzzy was a bear.
Fuzzy-Wuzzy had no hair.
Fuzzy-Wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy wuzzy?

Then there was the one for which I always fell:

Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me-Tight
Went down to the sea to bathe.
Adam and Eve were drowned.
Who do you think was saved?

Another was recited in the school grounds but never in front of parents:

Fatty and Skinny were having a race.
Fatty blew-off in the policeman’s face.

My favourite regular nursey rhyme was:

Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it,
But not a penny was in sight
Except the ribbon round it.
It might’ve been you.
It might’ve been you. etc

I liked it best probably because it was associated with a game of sitting in a circle and hiding an object and chasing other people. (Incidentally, if you don’t know it, it’s sung to the same tune as “Yankee Doodle” and they think that “Lucy Locket” may have come earlier than “Yankee Doodle”!)

Perhaps you have some rhymes from childhood that you might share in the comments? They don’t have to be utterly wholesome if that’s the way they were!

Story 32: Grace visits the zoo

This is the third day of seven days in which an earlier story is repeated. Today it is Story 32: “Grace visits the zoo”. It was first posted on 11 November 2013.

It was a week-long banter in the office. Grace was to take her niece and nephew to the zoo the coming Saturday. It began with Don’t slip in the poo at the zoo. After that, the entire week was spent by office staff on nonsensical zoological rhyming advice:

Don’t swear at the bear.
Don’t give a banana to the llama.
Don’t throw nuts at baboon butts.
Don’t be shocked at the elephant’s cock.
Don’t gawk at the bottom half of the giraffe.

What a relief it was for Grace when work finished on Friday and she (and everyone else) could say goodbye to the rhymes. There was the inevitable See you later alligator as she left.

The niece and nephew were beside themselves with excitement as their Aunt Grace paid for tickets at the zoo entrance. But thank goodness Grace had brought her bright red umbrella! It was raining and windy and quite horrible.

But not half as horrible as when she slipped in some poo and plunged headlong over the barrier down into the wolves’ enclosure. She was screaming and clutching her red umbrella. Within seconds it was impossible to tell what bits belonged to the umbrella and what bits once belonged to Grace.

The following week at the office, no one, for the life of them, could think of anything that rhymed with wolves.

Poems 110: Six Clerihews

The clerihew was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley when he was just 16 years old sometime in the first couple of decades of the 20^th century.

This poetic form consists of 4 whimsical lines about famous people. It is biographical and made up of irregular lines and meter. The rhyme structure is AABB. The first line must end with the subject’s name – most of the time the subject’s name IS the first line.

This poetic form was used by G.K. Chesterton and W.H. Auden (among others), so I’m in good company.

President Biden
Went into hidin’
Down in his basement.
They’ve made no replacement.

Kamala Harris
Went off to Paris.
She spoke in French accents
To sound like she made sense.

Anthony Fauci
Was feeling grouchy.
He created such boredon
That most folk ignored him.

Ms Jacinda Ardern
Promulgated COVIC restrictions quite stern.
No one took much notice ‘cos
Few knew who she was.

Prime Minister Boris
Wasn’t called Horace.
He called Number 10 his home
But didn’t have a comb.

President Biden
When polls had him slidin’
Said Hunter was the brightest man he knew –
Which is unfortunately true.

To hear the poem read aloud click HERE.

Poem 89: The empty space

This space is meant to have a pome,
I haven’t witten whum,
Bare the page, still the pen,
I sit here on my bum
It’s really rather dumb
No thoughts will ever come
Things are looking glum
My brain’s forever numb
I twiddle my thumbs

CRUMBS!

To hear the poem read aloud click HERE.

Poem 84: Stuck inside on yet another rainy day

It’s raining on my pomposity.
Now my pomposity’s all wet.
It’s a monstrosity.

Precipitation precipitates with considerable velocity.
There’s no stopping ‘locity
with or without an apostrophe.

Perhaps I should try reciprocity.
But rain falls with such ferocity
it makes reciprocity preposterously an impotossity.

If I’d been born a rhinoceros I’d have a lot more rhinosity.
I tell you, once my pomposity gets wet
I get filled with ridiculous verbosity.

It’s a philosophical atrocity,
especially when stuck inside
on yet another rainy day.

To hear the poem read aloud click HERE.

 

1082. Jack and Jill my foot

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after

Up Jack got and home did trot
As fast as he could caper
He went to bed and bound his head
With vinegar and brown paper.

Have you ever heard such balderdash?

The only reason they went “up the hill” was because “hill” rhymes with “Jill”. Obviously, one doesn’t go UP a hill to get water. If anything, one would go DOWN. In fact, they could have gone to a well to get water. It certainly makes more sense. All they need do is change the name from “Jill” to “Nell”.

Jack and Nell went to a well.

It’s possible they went to a “water hole in the bog”, but what girl’s name rhymes with “water hole in the bog”? Brook?

Jack fell down and broke his crown. Presumably they mean “crown of the head”. Well, if he broke that he’d be dead and not capering home to wrap things up with vinegar and brown paper. In all likelihood, he broke his arm. But “arm” doesn’t rhyme with “down”. At least not in my book.

Lies! Lies! Lies! I shudder to think of the lies that have been told throughout history for the sake of a rhyme. Imagine the fibs told by Shakespeare in all those sonnets. No wonder he wrote his plays in blank verse. And the whoppers scattered throughout Milton’s Paradise Lost. Phew! We won’t even begin to go into the Iliad and the Odyssey.

I could indeed go on about Jack and Jill to illustrate further this proclivity to lie for the sake of rhyme, but I won’t. Suffice to say that “water” doesn’t rhyme with “after” like the author clearly thinks it does. This makes it a lie in an unrhyme. Is there nothing true and sacred left in this world of ours?