Nursery Rhymes and the Plague

Nursery Rhymes and the Plague 

Ring-a-ring o’roses,

A pocket full of posies,

Ah-tishoo ahtishoo,

We all fall down.

 

It’s strange you know how things come back to you after a lifetime has passed. I remember as a wee one, dancing around in a circle and chanting this little verse. It didn’t mean much then. They were just words to keep time with—a chant to skip to—and when we all fell down we giggled. Actually, the rhyme first appeared in the 1881 edition of Mother Goose

 

Last night when I couldn’t sleep and the thinking machine would not turn off, I whispered the little rhyme aloud into the darkness. It came to me because I had heard it again just a couple of nights ago on a special TV program about the Bubonic Plague—the Black Death as it was called. The Great Plague of London which occurred in the mid sixteen hundreds… 1665-1666 to be exact.

 

The connection is that the victims of the plague broke out in red, circular eruptions, hence Ring-a-ring o’roses. The stench was so bad that the victims could smell their own bodies rotting. In order to quell some of that awful stench, flowers were sprinkled over the victims, hence A pocketful of posies.  The third line in the English version is a representation of a sneeze, Ahtishoo ahtishoo. The last line, We all fall down, is the representation of death.

 

It’s strange to think that an innocent child’s verse can be based on such a terrible happening such as the plague.

 

I wonder what other meanings there are beneath the words of nursery rhymes.

 

~ by woodnymph on February 2, 2007.