Word: rhyming
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...Robin Milne,* who insisted on calling himself Billy Moon. As Christopher Robin, Billy eventually became a fixture in thousands of nurseries in England and the U.S. If he went to the zoo or to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, his father put it all into rhyme. Even his evening prayers ("Oh! God Bless Daddy -I quite forgot") and the tantrums of his little friends ("What is the matter with Mary Jane?") worked their way into the repertory of mothers, nannies and children on both sides of the Atlantic. Billy's stuffed animals came to life...
Your Dec. 5 review of The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book would seem to indicate that children's verses follow the temper of the times. My contribution...
...origins of many nursery rhymes are shrouded in the fumes of taverns and mughouses, in a day when English ale and language were both stronger than they are now. How the songs got from the tavern to the nursery has never been quite clear, except that in the 17th and 18th centuries adults were far less squeamish about what was fit for children's ears than they are today. (Later, of course, many of the songs were expurgated and tied with pink and blue ribbons.) Often as not, nursery-rhyme characters were said to have had real counterparts, ranging...
Perhaps no one knows more about nursery-rhyme origins than a husband-and-wife team of Britons named Iona and Peter Opie. In The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (TIME, Sept. 24, 1951), they brought together more than 500 of the rhymes and songs that have been the unwitting introduction to literature for English-speaking children everywhere. Now the Opies have followed up with The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, which packs 800 rhymes, ballads, riddles and trippers, as well as hundreds of woodcuts that are almost always perfect companions to the text...
...everything the Opies have dug up is nursery gold. But, on the whole, they successfully recreate the nursery-rhyme universe in which the laws of logic, nature and rhyming are suspended. Cruelty can sound carelessly gay, love may be a mere whim, and justice a joke. And yet violence never seems to hurt, love in the child's world is really everywhere, and justice has its own triumphs, as when kings are reduced to thumb-size and beasts are great with wisdom. These verses have, in the words of Poet Walter de la Mare, "their own private and complete...