From the Nursery

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 384, 1 November 1946, Page 11

From the Nursery

"THE understanding and exploitation of anonymous popular verse may | often produce a rich harvest of poetry and of insight into aspects of the human mind otherwise ignored. The BBC "Book of Verse" programme which stepped aside from the normal preoccupation with the lyric poets and treated of "Nursery Rhymes" touched on an enticing field. These curious jingles, with their haunting rhythms and strange vocabulary, do not merely open a door into a world of memory and another of fantasy, they do this by a poetic method only recently introduced into serious verse, a. variety of symbolism, the inducement of a mood by the use of words which by their associations, their air of rich mystery, their incantatory and hypnotic quality, persuade the hearer into a dream state where he becomes conscious of new colours and sensations. Thus while it is all very well to hear how Old King Cole is a fifth-century Celtic monarch, and the Cat and the Fiddle is/are Catherine of Aragon ("Catherine la Fidele") and Antony Rowley of "a frog he would a-wooing go" is Charles II ("named Rowley after a favourite racehorse, renowned for the number and beauty of its offsprifig")-assuming all this, one must not forget that these signficances are for the most part so long since forgotten that they have lost all but antiquarian interest. Heaven forbid that we should scorn this latter but the fact as regards nursery rhymes is that centuries of repetition have robbed the words of their direct meaning and left them only the incantatory value mentioned above. This, presumably, was how they came to be the property of young children; familiar and innocent of meaning, they were used to induce bonhomie and somnolence in the young while the impatient adult passed on to make new and different songs.