Outlaw Rhymes

...Hang 'em on the bushes, When the bushes begin to crack, Their coarseness and cruelty are as genuine as their Hang 'em on a nigger's back, sensitiveness and compassion...

...and, on the other hand, the content of many of the verses ought to raise them Others do not pretend to express any sort of consecu- to a high level of acceptability...

...Who smocks and nursery wall-paper...

...If it were not for the substantial uni326 THE COMMONWEAL August 4, 1926 formity of these lyrical tramps everywhere, I should belong in the same category...

...I actually taught them...

...yielded no parallels to Mr...

...The children across the street were Republi- And held to her heart, her heart's desire...

...citizen, at the end of the song about the lady's dishes...

...Certainly there can be no doubt patriotic children, who accordingly substituted that it is their anti-social character which endears them "Kaiser" for "devil," effected other emendations in to the childish mind...

...To these genteel questions I beg to add a new one, a description, by the way, to be construed more as an not at all genteel but a good deal more genuinely per- abstract symbol of hatred than as a literal picture...

...Confronted by such may be in kitchens or on the open street...

...To rock in her arms of lichened hollows But, whether because the politics of that far time The young of ever-returning swallows...

...Ask me again How came a whole countryside, a whole nation, to be And I'll knock you down...

...The time when we were called inside and suitably talked first ran thus to...

...terseness is the word with them: Yell and run...

...One wants Perhaps you were not allowed any of the nice pudding to know concretely if these were bits of gradually with the raisins in it...

...else has perished out of life...

...or you may even have been made achieved loveliness, appearing only at the tenth repeti- to stay home from Ralph's party...

...Down the cellar eating sauerkraut...

...vital principle in "Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the Putten Tame...

...Their mere One jumped in and one jumped out, lack of polish should not-judging from the specimens And one jumped in the sauerkraut, of the literary craft which the knights of the flaming One can sing and one can dance, cross have caused to be printed-operate to prejudice And one can make a pair of pants...

...In a way, they resemble those rowdy songs which never get into print, yet never lack singers...

...Then there is the heart-warming recommendaHell triple, hell triple, tion as to the shortest way with the colored fellowDamn, damn, damn...

...about which we not only knew nothing but never She knows every change in the mavis's song, even dreamed of pretending to know anything) with Those wild, sweet phrases of joy and fear, a hatred and virulence which are positively awesome She owns the hearts of everything young: to recall...

...remember having been taught a single one...

...She croons them the song of long, long agoThe song of the Abbey's once-famous bells a rousing cry, pregnant with victory...

...Thackeray himself never did Gee, golly, gosh, darn, Deuce, devil, damn, better...

...eat Winpenie Abbey (For W. R. C.) I have never come across this specimen outside of my own native Minnesota...

...They will wince at When the nigger begins to run, brutality of speech or demeanor, will cry over one Shoot him with a leather gun another's woes, or the sufferings of their pets...

...He was beginning to sing it a third I remember one or two concluding examples...

...seeded with the happy foolishness of some private fireside ? No...

...It humiliated us That three sister-valleys used to know...

...He sang it twice, and I am sure I saw their faces pale...

...GameSmarty, Smarty, Had a party, songs must be excluded, too, although they also comNobody came prise examples which, from their dash and irresponsiBut Bridget McCarthy...

...If Democrats eat pickled rats, Republicans eat mouldy cats...

...And so the election was lost...

...ing the dominion of society long enough to enjoy their own tastes...

...But what nurse or mother ever taught baby that flying gaiety and nonsense...

...My brother sang it once, and they were stricken to a foolDutchman, Dutchman, stuffed with straw, Can't say nothing but yaw, yaw, yaw ! ish silence...

...Inseparable playmates At Winpenie, she is the first to hear in times of peace, we fought out the political issue The laverock-choir...

...There is, for example, tive idea, but satisfy by the mere voluptuous mouthing the perfectly evident aspersion upon the social status of "swear words...

...My eldest brother imThe Sheeny washed the winda, provised upon their chant as follows The winda broke, the Sheeny croaked, Honey Kazack Kazinda...

...The epic and ballad, how- suppose children have a secret society for transmitting ever mysterious their origins, have always had the them, and it all goes on when they are too young to countenance of society, and similarly the authorities remember...

...They Step on a hole, were put there by someone who knew with exactitude Break your mother's bowl, how to humiliate the childish mind and abase the Step on a stone, Break your mother's bone, niceties of childish self-regard...

...The insults in Break your mother's back, the typical outlaw rhyme are not accidental...

...persist...

...We delighted in the song mainly be- a version which seemed to me then, and seems to me cause it painted a picture of someone croaking...

...It is not so easy to account for children's one gets singularly little satisfaction out of being told circumvention of the watches that are put upon them...

...tion...

...They are the secret inheritance of volve no stigma...

...If, as has been maintained, the mild vanity ment of the moment, and sang the new version up and of Little Jack Horner is a vicarious assuagement of down the land in one vast infantine chorus...

...It is one of And our Lady is lone, but her heart is the same those songs into which a people pours its soul in a As the night when her tiny Jesus came, great national crisis...

...Denby, or DOROTHY TINA RATCLIFFE...

...What I have called them, that they are-outOf course, this is the same question which is so often laws...

...Your mother said, a people, that they were "handed down by word of "Where do you get those things...

...They pick up a precarious living somehow, it asked about epics and ballads...

...August 4, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 325 OUTLAW RHYMES By MARY KOLARS T HE debate which is waged periodically about the are behind Mother Goose...

...Joe, Joe, made it go, Frank, Frank, turned the crank, His mother came out and gave him a spank, And sent him over the river bank...

...childhood, its common property throughout the land...

...Who makes up the outlaw rhymes, and how In the age of innocence, bow legs qua bow legs indo they survive...

...plexing...

...imbecile...

...And what is the What's your name...

...nor have Yet whoever heard, whoever imagined, a child being I ever talked with anyone else who remembered...

...You were warned...

...the hooded mind against them...

...some anonymous baby, their hold on immortality...

...cans...

...And lastly there is not only the classic couplet The many variants of the verse about the devil, one of which runs Where was Moses when the light went out...

...During the world -that every child lisps in numbers of contumely for war, word was seemingly passed underground to all the numbers come...

...They are penalized...

...It is a fact that, while I myself possessed a more North, south, east, west, the same rhythmic syllables than adequate repertoire of outlaw rhymes, I do not of ribaldry and derision trip from the infant tongue...

...Beyond the innocent selfishness and unsocial candor lies something else...

...Yet none of these tion, or if they were struck off at the first, and then measures availed to keep you from the dear relief carefully noted and treasured...

...This last, by the way, almost be willing to believe that they represent each furnished a recent instance of the mobility and quick time a spontaneous ebullition of resentment or dislike dissemination of the outlaw rhyme...

...quite horribly...

...I do not mean in the least Little Boy Blue are grafted upon the child's budding to ask who it was that ultimately wrote her down (I consciousness by nurse or mother before its very know it was a Frenchman) giving a final shape to all prayers...

...They are forI wish I were where Helen lies, bidden...

...I mean, who actually lips to frame such cocky, disreputable doggerel as this brought the nonsense into being...

...rhymes designed, presumably, for the beguiling of John Brown...

...Loyal for five slow centuries) The last example of all would be found dispersed A crescent of wind-bowed silver willows, over a much wider territory, but the trouble with it The circling stars and a silent pool: is that it is only intermittently recited...

...They are lines as hunted from respectable nurseries...

...It is a bit too long to be a successful outlaw Her little darling Son...

...But in the nature of every child there are outlying tracts un- as also in the chant which accompanies the ritual of annexed, as yet, by refinement or morality...

...she is adorably illusGoose, has suggested to me certain other questions trated, she adorns building blocks and cushions and only partly relevant but very fascinating...

...Step on a space, Some of these rhymes are no more than harmlessly Break your mother's face...

...One widely found example runs of anyone bearing a Hibernian name: "And nobody thus: came but Bridget McCarthy"-could anything be more contemptuously explicit...

...Little Bo Peep and created Mother Goose...

...For instance, And it is more than mere egoism in the child which there is much of the outlaw in the following: seeks expression...

...They used regularly to march their cohorts Ever she has the love to lure to the edge of their bounding picket fence, directly The first pair of swallows from over the moor, facing our yard, and sing: Secure from alarms They build a nest in her crumbling arms: Democrats eat pickled rats, When the nestlings peek through brittle shells Republicans eat sugar plums...

...equivocally adverse comment, but also the widely celeAugust 4, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 327 brated ditty which my familiars and I sang with a because we in my yard were only normally stupid satisfaction none the less real for being obscure children, we let the opportunity slip...

...bility, as well as from a certain lack of refined sentiment, seem to be on the border-land...

...and even within its boundar- Our Lady sits on the ruined gate ies, its popularity was, in my experience, highly local- Between Saint Luke and Saint John, ized, centering mainly in the playroom of my own And once she held in her joyful arms home...

...or the couplet Only the songs are quite definitely passed from mouth And naebody kens that he lies there to mouth by adults, who have plenty of ways of escapBut his hawk and his hound and his lady fair...

...I suppose a sufficiently precocious And though no longer she rocks her child, ironist would have seized upon their last line to re- In her ageless beauty, she's reconciled tort: " `Republicans eat sugar plums'-well, rather...

...She is printed on tough moral utility or the moral turpitude (if I may linen paper, to invest her with a kind of immortality make free of that storied phrase) of Mother before infant teeth and talons...

...The dickens, the deuce, The devil got loose which not everyone, perhaps, might feel to be an unAnd sat on the dam to darn...

...We were Democrats...

...and because the last name, in Have made for her narrow shoulders, a cloak, particular, being that of a very young brother indeed, And her only worshippers are the treeslent itself happily to illustrative action on the part of A ring of pines and a dying oak, other brothers a little older...

...that epics and ballads "embodied" the this-and-that of Recall your own childhood...

...fiddle" or "Simple Simon met a pieman" which caused Ask me again them to remain to be written down, when so much And I'll tell you the same...

...disdain for one of the great Nordic races But the history of that innovation was a sad one...

...and hence sidewalk-stepping: it is that the most finely organized and fastidious children sometimes exult in coarseness, or in deliberately Step on a crack, trampling on one another's nerves...

...what Alice bum-balice, religious care committed them to posterity and Tee-alley-go falice, solemnly charged the new singers with their preserva- Tee-legged, toe-legged, bow-legged Alice...

...Children, those Wash the lady's dishes, flower-like, fairy-like beings, are coarse and cruel...

...mouth from generation to generation...

...What gave the random What's your name...

...I And once she was young and wore a crown suspect that it was so much affected on our premises And the folds of her gown because two of the names it mentions were the names Were slim and straight and beautiful: Now the lichen browns and yellows of two of my brothers...

...and now, to compensate for a certain forcing of its logic we sang with equal relish a lyrical embodiment of with ringing rhyme values far superior to the original...

...I first heard it in the campaign When she heard the lowing of cows in the byre of 1904...

...baby egoism smarting under the first touch of bit and Counting-out rhymes do not belong here, of course, rein, how much more potent are such positive lashings though many of them, for instance the one which out as: begins, "My-mother-hit-your-mother-in-the-face-with-abrick," are closely allied in structure and spirit...

...Later, we heard the Republican version again fluctuating in the gale, but circumstances prevented our Jean, Jean, made a machine, rallying to a reply...

...Fall and Mr...

...None of us, I wish to record, had any idea of what a "Sheeny" was...

...And, assuming the of utterance in re, for instance, the detestability of latter to be the case, one wants to know what con- Alice : sciousness noted, what memory treasured, them...

...Of such is the immemorial favorite It occurs to me that the Ku Klux Klan ought to I know something and I won't tell, Three little niggers in a peanut shell, approve unreservedly of these rhymes...

...Yet, miraculously, they Night and day on me she cries...

...Even so, we did Honey Kazack Kazinda, not come off without credit...

...Talk about the literature of the text, all of them gratifying to the national sentiescape...