Little Jack Horner sat in a corner...

October 23, 2003 12:43 PM

The Real Mother Goose, complete with pictures. Revisit your childhood and see how many Mother Goose rhymes you remember, then go through the list to find ones that you don't know. And in the what-were-they-thinking category, check out mothergooserocks.com for wacky tunes (click the music section and play the 3 Little Pigs - go on, I dare you) sung to top 40 tunes.
posted by ashbury (9 comments total)

[This is good.] But what do they mean?
posted by rushmc at 4:51 PM on October 23, 2003

Wonderful, ashbury - thanks!

I was astonished to find that I still know almost every verse by heart and, no, rushmc, I still don't know what they mean. I suspect I was much nearer to their significance when I was 5 years old...
posted by MiguelCardoso at 5:43 PM on October 23, 2003

I'm wondering if anyone else caught the wonderful "Ms. Goose" references in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver? The lines about "culinary implements leaping over celestial bodies" made me rethink my relationship with Mother Goose. Thanks for the link ashbury.
posted by vito90 at 8:16 PM on October 23, 2003

vito, I'm currently reading Quicksilver and that's exactly why I went looking for Mother Goose material.
posted by ashbury at 8:55 PM on October 23, 2003

Eh! dites-le, dites-le, De quatre et méfie de le. And if you want them, more N'Heures Souris Rames.
posted by dhartung at 11:16 PM on October 23, 2003

I was searching around a bit for the origins of nursery rhymes and found this hilarious essay: The History of Bo Peep: An Agricultural Employee's Tragedy in contemporary Literary Perspective.

An excerpt: "Bo Peep is the Id, beset by its desires for sexual gratification and tormented by the absence of any object. The voice is the voice of the ego, struggling to adjust the demands of the pleasure principle to the constraints of the reality principle. It is building a defence mechanism to cope with the stress of the loss of desire."
posted by taz at 11:54 PM on October 23, 2003

ashbury - That's cool! Have you seen the Quicksilver Wiki page? Here... And here is the entry for Mrs. Goose...
posted by vito90 at 6:55 AM on October 24, 2003

This reminds me of the"Three Little Pigs" by Green Jello, (er, Green Jelly after their dispute with some food manufacturer).
posted by caddis at 2:21 PM on October 24, 2003

vito, neat wiki - thanks for that. I like the fact that Neal is directly involved. Christ, that guy's a genius, isn't he?
posted by ashbury at 7:44 AM on October 25, 2003