rhyme

[timepiececlock]

I went all morning trying to remember this. The third line was all I knew.


Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye;
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing;
Was not that a dainty dish,
To set before the king?

The king was in his counting-house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.

The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes;
When down came a blackbird,
And pecked off her nose.



Hm... I bet that's an English nursery rhyme. It sounds more English than American.

Comments

[octopedingenue]

I'm absolutely fascinated by fairy tales and folklore; I'm intent on studying them as an educational project at some point in my college career, maybe as a term paper or summat... Here is an interesting page on the history of the Sleeping Beauty tale. I haven't read the Anne Rice version you mentioned, but it's probably a play on the version in which Talia (the Sleeping Beauty) is raped and impregnated as she sleeps. "Admiring her beauty for a while"--bleh. Here's an amusingly snarky summation of the same fairy tale. This version has her children sucking the poisoned flax from her finger and awakening her; I'd heard a version in which their nursing awakens her. I've read several modern fairy tale story "revamps" (your Rice story is probably one of them) that explore the darker aspects of this marchen and others like it. They're very, very interesting and probably what got me interested in folklore as an academic subject.