It would seem logical to begin an essay on nursery rhymes with childhood. But I want to begin instead with old age—or, to be more precise, the link between childhood and old age.
My wife’s grandmother recently passed away. A few days before her passing, my wife and 2-year-old daughter were visiting her and my wife’s mother, and somehow they came to the subject of traditional nursery rhymes. We’d been teaching some to my daughter. My little girl began to prattle away, reciting several rhymes for her grandmother and great-grandmother.
Then something remarkable happened. Despite her severe dementia, my wife’s grandmother joined in, reciting the rhymes with her great-granddaughter, word for word. The same words lilted from both the young and the aged tongue. Though newfound for my daughter and long-familiar for her great-grandmother, the words were the same. A bridge between the generations formed in that unexpected moment. The years faded away, and though so many other memories were lost to her great-grandmother, the memory of those simple rhymes returned, and with them, the glow of her own childhood.
I share this anecdote to portray the power and value of nursery rhymes and encourage you to teach them to your children and grandchildren.
Enduring Rhymes
These traditional nursery rhymes, such as the Mother Goose collections, have real staying power, both in the human mind and in society writ large. Rhymes remain engraved in the mind and memory, enduring over decades and resurfacing at the end of life, even when many other memories are gone. I’m sure there are scientific reasons for this. But I believe there are also poetic reasons, which I’ll focus on.Philosophical reasons gather around a central point: Nursery rhymes are about timeless things, like hills and valleys, apples and plums, cats and dogs, cows and sheep, singing and dancing, children and their grandparents. In delightful and memorable language, nursery rhymes depict the ordinary things of everyday life. They happen to be some of the most beautiful, most enduring realities. These realities make up the day-to-day world of childhood, and the nursery rhymes teach children (and adults) to delight in that world.
The world of childhood is timeless—children live at a different speed. When you were a child, you thought childhood would never end, that the long days playing in the woods would never cease. The timelessness and universality of the little poems, which capture something of childhood, may explain why they endure in both our individual memories and collective social memory for so long—although, sadly, traditional nursery rhymes are falling out of favor today.
One criticism directed at Mother Goose rhymes is that they’re outdated. After all, little boys don’t sleep under haystacks anymore, little girls aren’t familiar with curds and whey, and most children don’t take pigs to market. In response to this objection, we must note first that most of these diminutive rhymes’ subject matter—stars, the moon, animals, trees, childhood imagination, etc.—never grows dated. Its timelessness keeps it new.
‘A Love of the Past’
Furthermore, nursery rhymes grow out of the past and produce a love of the past. As literature professor Dennis Quinn said, “This is sometimes called traditional literature because it’s been handed down. ... It’s something that was already old when it was handed on from generation to generation.” Nursery rhymes have always been “outdated” because they’re about old, timeless things.Quinn’s colleague John Senior insisted that the sense of tradition is essential to nursery rhymes: “There’s something here that we do have to raise: a love of the past. All these stories are grounded in that. That we are carrying on some kind of tradition. That this life of ours is like a tree that has roots. We’ll find our nourishment in the roots.” Appreciation for tradition inherent in nursery rhymes puts us in touch with the wisdom of the past.
Appreciation of tradition bears further reflection. When we instill in children a love for old verses that have been handed down for generations, that have acquired a status of venerability through age, custom, and universal approval, we prepare them to embrace other gifts from the past when they get older. We prepare them to appreciate traditional art, classic literature, and perennial philosophy, along with countless other treasures that are their birthright. From this rich heritage, they can suck the sap of wisdom. Mother Goose is a distant preparation for William Shakespeare, not only by giving children an ear for beautiful sounds and rhythms—fostering delight in language—but also by bestowing an appreciation for the good things of the past.
Tradition also links the generations, as evidenced by the beautiful moment my daughter and her great-grandmother shared. Through nursery rhymes, the little girl and the old woman had something in common: a shared experience, a shared love. Fostering understanding, connection, respect, and the transmission of wisdom between the generations is a herculean effort when the generations have nothing in common. Tradition—even a simple little tradition like a rhyme—binds the generations together in love, respect, and shared experience. When strong relationships don’t exist between the generations, then wisdom, experience, and virtue are lost with the passing of the elders, who couldn’t transmit anything to an unwilling younger generation.
A final word about the linguistic and poetic education provided by old-fashioned nursery rhymes. The nursery rhymes you'll find in a Mother Goose collection emerge from a distant, hazy oral tradition reaching back hundreds of years. Whoever their original author or authors, one thing we know: they are well-written. I imagine that’s how they’ve stood the onslaught of the ages. Mother Goose rhymes brim with wordplay, rhymes, and rhythms. They teach children a love of sound and meter. They play games with words.
Like all play, this wordplay is a preparation for something. This language play, begun at the dawn of a child’s memory, prepares the way for the serious task of reading and writing. At their best, those continue the wordplay of childhood, transmuted into the wordsmithing of adulthood. The foundations of good reading and writing lie in nursery rhymes that elicit a joy in language from young readers. Nursery rhymes have helped generations of children in this way.The old-fashioned ones, being particularly well-written, have proven their durability.
Good children’s books and rhymes are still being written today. We do well to take advantage of those contemporary works. But we shouldn’t let them crowd out tattered old copies of Mother Goose, whose little rhymes shine with beauty, charm, and wisdom.
These poems—like all good literature—help us participate more deeply in the things around us. They open our eyes to the goodness of the ordinary, which in turn opens our hearts. That’s an experience that adults can benefit from just as much as children—maybe more so. As Senior says, speaking to adults, “You yourself need to be refreshed. You yourself need to catch sight of the end. And the end of human life is wisdom, that is knowledge of the truth, possession of the truth. And these poems ... they have wisdom.”
Senior explained that looking at the poems and their subjects—ordinary life—through the eyes of a child will help adults to see the world anew: “Sit down with a child because a child can open up your eyes to what’s there, your tired old eyes that need refreshing. If you read this with a child, you will discover what everybody always has discovered—that is, that these things really are good. And then you’ll love them, and that delight and that enthusiasm that you’re supposed to have will happen quite naturally.”
