Rhymes Old and New : collected by M.E.S. Wright — Text and Context

Local Voices and Regional Variants

Wright's preface emphasizes that many rhymes appear 'with local variations,' and the text bears this out. The weather couplets are tagged by county: Essex gives 'Winter thunder, and summer flood, / Bode England no good'; Staffordshire offers 'Cuckoo oats and Michaelmas hay, / Will make the farmer run away'; and a Devonshire cuckoo rime runs 'March he sits upon his perch; / April he soundeth his bell.' These attributions ground the verses in specific landscapes and oral traditions, suggesting that Wright valued regional distinctiveness over a single standardized version.

Several rhymes are explicitly noted as coming from particular sources: 'The complete version of “The Ram of Derby,” is taken from Jewitt’s “Reliquary”;' and 'A Dutch Lullaby' from Eugene Field's A Little Book of Western Verse is included by permission. The compiler also acknowledges selections from Notes and Queries, Chambers's Popular Rhymes, and Northall's Folk Rhymes. This careful sourcing gives the collection an ethnographic texture, even as many pieces remain unattributed.

Rhythms of the Agricultural Year

The opening 'Couplets' and 'Weather and Season Rhymes' sections are dominated by proverbial observations about farming and the calendar. 'A bushel of March dust is a thing / Worth the ransom of a king' and 'A cold April / Is the poor man’s fill' compress practical wisdom into two lines. The seasonal rhymes often pair weather with crop outcomes: 'A shower of rain in July, when the corn begins to fill, / Is worth a plough of oxen, and all belongs theretill.'

Animal behavior is also read as omen or instruction. The Norfolk cuckoo rime warns: 'When the cuckoo comes to the bare thorn, / Sell your cow and buy your corn; / But when she comes to the full bit, / Sell your corn and buy you sheep.' A note glosses 'mooncall' as the cuckoo in Norfolk dialect. These verses treat the natural world as a system of signs, where birds and weather dictate human action—a worldview that the collection preserves without commentary.

Dialogue, Nonsense, and Narrative Turns

Several entries shift from simple rhyme into miniature dramatic scenes. 'The Ape and the Cockatoo' is a quarrel in alternating voices, complete with a footnote identifying the 'Wanderoo' as a Ceylonese ape. 'The Obstinate Chicken' presents a hen and chick in dialogue: 'Hen: “Go not down that distant walk; / Yonder flies the savage hawk;” / Chicken: “Nasty hawk is far away, / I may safely go and play.”' The chicken's defiance leads to an implied consequence, though the excerpt breaks off before the resolution.

Other rhymes employ tongue-twisters ('A peacock picked a peck of pepper'), cumulative structures, or abrupt nonsense. The Dorset rime 'Vlee away, blackie cap! / Don’t ye hurt measter’s crap' uses dialect spelling to capture a speaker's voice. These pieces show the collection's range beyond simple didacticism, incorporating humor, threat, and verbal play that reward reading aloud.

Readers approaching Rhymes Old and New will find a deliberately heterogeneous gathering: some verses are familiar nursery staples, others are obscure local variants or dialect pieces. The compiler's preface acknowledges the difficulty of tracing authorship and apologizes for any inadvertent copyright infringement. Because the text is a collection rather than a single authored work, its interest lies in the juxtaposition of tones—from agricultural proverbs to nonsense dialogues—and in the regional and historical layers that Wright has preserved. The rhymes reward reading in sequence, where shifts in voice and subject create a mosaic of nineteenth-century folk and juvenile verse.

The rain found a rhythm matching old verses from M.E.S. Wright’s collection, those sturdy rhymes about magpies and weather signs. It made me think how every caution carries a story. That afternoon, I drifted to a different sort of warning, the gallows lament in The Convict's Farewell: with Advice to Criminals, before and after Trial — Story, Setting & Ideas, and the weight of both felt strangely kindred.