Expressions similar sea of roses install#
However, many versions do not make them portable but install them in in pots or bottles, which doesn’t fit well with the plague interpretation.
“Posies,” or bouquets of flowers, are almost universal in the song. Moreover, in many versions, everyone gets up again once they have fallen down, which hardly makes sense if falling down represents death.
Expressions similar sea of roses full#
For example, Iona and Peter Opie give an 1883 version (in which “curchey” is dialect for “curtsey”): A ring, a ring o’roses A pocket full of posies One for Jack and one for Jim and one for little Moses A curchey in and a curchey out And a curchey all together Many versions have no words that sound like sneezes, and many versions don’t mention falling down. This allows us to ask whether the specific images associated with the plague occur in all or even most versions. First, like most folklore items, this rhyme exists in many versions and variants. This interpretation emerged in the mid-twentieth century, and has become widespread, but it has never been accepted by folklorists, for several reasons. The fatalism of the rhyme is brutal: the roses are a euphemism for deadly rashes, the posies a supposed preventative measure the a-tishoos pertain to sneezing symptoms, and the implication of everyone falling down is, well, death. Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses is all about the Great Plague the apparent whimsy being a foil for one of London’s most atavistic dreads (thanks to the Black Death).
I’ll discuss one of the rhymes in particular, because it tells us interesting things about folklore and our ideas about folklore: “Ring Around the Rosie,” or “Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses,” as it’s sometimes known.įitzGerald’s text goes like this: Ring-a-ring-a-roses,įitzGerald states emphatically that this rhyme arose from the Great Plague, an outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague that affected London in the year 1665: Or do they? Looking closely at these rhymes, and at scholarship surrounding them, suggests other interpretations. Her illustration was published in 1881 and is therefore in the public domain.Ī recent blog post at Londonist describes “Five London Nursery Rhymes Depicting Death and Ruin.” The rhymes in question have diverse origins and histories, but what seems incontrovertible from James FitzGerald’s work is that they describe dark and portentous matters from English history. Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose or the Old Nursery Rhymes (1881) was the first publication of “Ring Around the Rosie” in English.
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