This week’s theme: poems you’ve been moved to memorise

Minstrels member Bronson Stocker suggested a great idea for a theme - “Must memorise poems”. I decided to alter that slightly, to poems that people have been actually moved to memorise themselves - surely the sincerest indication that a poem is worth memorising! However, my enthusiasm soon ran into a small snag - I’ve already run all the poems I felt compelled to memorise, most of them in the first fine careless rapture of starting Minstrels, and I daresay Thomas has done the same.

Happily, I remembered that I’ve been meaning to run another nursery rhyme for a while now, and nursery rhymes are surely the canonical example of poems that people have memorised. They’re also wonderful examples of memorable poetry, with strong rhythms, perfect rhymes (the wonders of an oral tradition) and (unlike a lot of children’s poetry) a vocabulary that does not condescend to the reader.

Indeed, I’ve learnt a fair amount from nursery rhymes - what a dapple horse was, and a tuffet, and comfits, the names of a good many historic churches in London (taking what I mentally called the “Oranges and Lemons tour as a college student was a wonderful combination of discovery and nostalgia), that Thirty Days had September, and a lot of other things that seeped in by osmosis when I was simply enjoying the sounds and shapes of the words.

And why this particular nursery rhyme? Simply because to this day I cannot eat a strawberry without having the beautifully rhythmic phrase “and dine upon strawberries, sugar and cream” running through my mind. Some poems simply work their way into your brain with no effort on your part.

— Martin

[Folk Process]

Another, and, I speculate, later version runs:

    Bonny lass! bonny lass! will you be mine?
    Thou shalt neither wash dishes, nor serve the wine;
    But sit on a cushion, and sew up a seam,
    And dine upon strawberries, sugar and cream.

(I suspect the “later” because the specific “curly-locks” has been replaced by the more generic “bonny lass”, and “feed the swine” to the more genteel “serve the wine”. I could well be wrong, though.)

In the nursery rhyme, I’ve seen the word ‘dine’ in the last line replaced by “feed”, “sup” and “feast” variously; I’ve chosen to run the version I learnt as a kid. Line 2 is sometimes “Thou shalt not wash the dishes”, suggesting that the first foot changes from “thou SHALT” to “thou shalt NOT”, arguably a more sensible stressing, but the two unstressed syllables in the start break out of the poem’s rhythm. I’ve also seen “nor feed the swine”, which matches the “Bonny lass” version above, but doesn’t scan as satisfyingly as “nor yet feed the swine”

Links

Two pages speculating on the poem’s origins:

http://nurseryrhymes.allinfoabout.com/curly_locks.html

http://www.rhymes.org.uk/a20-curly-locks.htm

Theme

To reiterate, we’re running a theme on poems you’ve been moved to memorise - do send your favourites in!

— Martin