This week we’ve paid tribute to poets of the rude and rumbustious and the sly and snide but we’ll mark the end of Children’s Book Week with the quiet, deceptively simple verse of Christina Rossetti. Her Sing-Song is perhaps the greatest tribute any writer has paid to the English nursery rhyme. Almost every type of traditional children’s verse Iona and Peter Opie catalogued in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes has its counterpart in Sing-Song, but delicately transformed into something entirely original, accompanied by Arthur Hughs’ tender, sharply observed illustrations.
She makes rhymes for mothers to love their little ones:
My baby has a mottled fist;
My baby has a neck in creases;
My baby kisses and is kissed
For he’s the very thing for kisses.
She gives a mother words when cuddles are not in order– for a little while:
Seldom “can’t,”
Seldom “don’t;”
Never “shan’t,”
Never ‘won’t.”
She introduces the rigorous mysteries of nonsense:
A city plum is not a plum;
A dumb-bell is no bell, though dumb;
A statesman’s rat is not a rat;
A sailor’s cat is not a cat;
A soldier’s frog is not a frog;
A captain’s log is not a log.
She reminds little rough hands to be gentle:
Hurt no living thing,
Ladybird, nor butterfly,
Nor moth with dusty wing,
Nor cricket chirping cheerily,
Nor grasshopper so light of leap,
Nor dancing gnat, nor beetle fat,
Nor harmless worms that creep.
Hear what the poem sounds like read aloud.
She glories in the colors:
What is pink? a rose is pink
By the fountain’s brink.
What is red? a poppy’s red
In its barley bed.
What is blue? the sky is blue
Where the clouds float thro’.
What is white? a swan is white
Sailing in the light.
What is yellow? pears are yellow,
Rich and ripe and mellow.
Wnat is green? the grass is green,
With small flowers between.
What is violet? clouds are violet
In the summer twilight.
What is orange? why an orange,
Just an orange!
And closing with the poem set to music and sung.
