I’ve always thought of this one as a nursery rhyme that didn’t quite make it. More fairly, it’s balanced somewhere between traditional nursery rhymes like ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ and biting social commentary like Cleghorn’s “The Golf Links” [Poem #216], with a dash of the proverb thrown in.

The reason today’s poem never made it as a nursery rhyme is fairly obvious - it’s too explicit. Traditional ‘hidden meaning’ nursery rhymes were slyly humorous, veiling their ridicule in allusion. Of course, at the time of writing, the allusion would have been totally transparent, and ensured that the rhyme got passed around with a wink and a nudge in taverns and on street corners. Later generations would see it merely as an amusing children’s poem, but there again it would get handed down from parent to child, until it was ubiquitous.

On the other hand, today’s poem’s meaning is clear in general terms. It’s even relevant enough that people can still relate to it. However, the Inclosure Act to which it refers was passed hundreds of years ago; the poem is no longer current, and loses something thereby. And, lacking the enforced whimsy of the more allusive nursery rhymes, it was never seen as a children’s poem - rather than being passed down as attractive nonsense when it lost its topicality, it faded into a sort of semiobscurity.

One aspect of the nursery rhyme it has shared is alteration via the folk process. There are several versions floating around, from minor variants like the substitution of ‘villain’ for ‘felon’, to the following from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations:

  "The fault is great in man or woman
   Who steals a goose from off a common:
   But what can plead that man's excuse
   Who steals a common from a goose?"

–The Tickler Magazine, 1 Feb. 1821.

Like Swift’s poem on lesser fleas, though, I am fairly confident that the folk process has improved the original - poems that are handed down orally tend to undergo a rather ruthless evolutionary winnowing. If they’re not good enough, they don’t get repeated, and if a mutated form is more quotable or pleasing, it has a very good chance of replacing the original.

— Martin

Links

An alt.quotations thread on the poem:

http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=dpbsmith-B90F%40news.cis.dfn.de

 The Inclosure Act, in context
  [broken link] http://www.coprolite.care4free.net/page70.html

http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010136ernle/010136ch7.htm