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

(2 User reviews) 403

In Category - Fantasy Juvenile Worlds

Authors: Wright, M. E. S. [Compiler] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2009 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Children's poetry Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 18,992

Reading time 83 min

Text sections 3

The catalog record for Rhymes Old and New : collected by M.E.S. Wright — Text and Context provides practical reading context through 18,992 words, 1 hr 23 min estimated reading time, and 3 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 20.2 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Children's poetry,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #30426

A 1900 collection of nursery rhymes and folk verses compiled by M.E.S. Wright, featuring local variants, seasonal couplets, and animal lore from British oral tradition, with sources ranging from Poor Robin's Almanac to Notes and Queries.

Editorial Edition Score 4.5/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg30426

Read the Text

Who was then the gentleman?

I see the moon, and the moon sees me, God bless the moon, and God bless me.

WEATHER AND SEASON RHYMES

January brings the snow, Makes our feet and fingers glow.

February brings the rain, Thaws the frozen lake again.

March brings breezes loud and shrill, Stirs the dancing daffodil.

April brings the primrose sweet, Scatters daisies at our feet.

May brings flocks of pretty lambs, Skipping by their fleecy dams.

June brings tulips, lilies, roses, Fills the children's hands with posies.

Hot July brings cooling showers, Apricots and gillyflowers.

August brings the sheaves of corn, Then the harvest home is borne.

Warm September brings the fruit, Sportsmen then begin to shoot.

Fresh October brings the pheasant, Then to gather nuts is pleasant.

Dull November brings the blast, Then the leaves are whirling fast.

Chill December brings the sleet, Blazing fire and Christmas treat.

The moon and the weather May change together; But change of the moon Does not change the weather; If we'd no moon at all, And that may seem strange, We still should have weather That's subject to change.

Autumn wheezy, sneezy, freezy; Winter slippy, drippy, nippy; Spring showery, flowery, bowery; Summer hoppy, croppy, poppy.

As I sat under a sycamore tree, sycamore tree, sycamore tree, I looked me out upon the sea, A Christmas day in the morning.

I saw three ships a sailing there, sailing there, sailing there, The Virgin Mary and Christ they bare, A Christmas day in the morning.

He did whistle and she did sing, she did sing, she did sing, And all the bells on earth did ring, A Christmas day in the morning.

And now we hope to taste your cheer, taste your cheer, taste your cheer, And wish you all a happy New Year, A Christmas day in the morning.

The rose is red, the violet blue, The gillyflower sweet, and so are you; These are the words you bade me say, For a pair of new gloves on Easter-day.

Here we come a whistling, through the fields so green; Here we come a singing, so far to be seen. God send you happy, God send you happy, Pray God send you a Happy New Year!

The roads are very dirty, my boots are very thin, I have a little pocket, to put a penny in. God send you happy, God send you happy, Pray God send you a Happy New Year!

Bring out your little table, and spread it with a cloth, Bring out some of your old ale, likewise your Christmas loaf. God send you happy, God send you happy, Pray God send you a Happy New Year!

God bless the master of this house, likewise the mistress too; And all the little children that round the table strew. God send you happy, God send you happy, Pray God send you a Happy New Year!

If Christmas Day on Thursday be, A windy winter you shall see; Windy weather in each week, And hard tempests strong and thick; The summer shall be good and dry, Corn and beasts shall multiply; That year is good for lands to till, Kings and princes shall die by skill; If a child that day born should be It shall happen right well for thee, Of deeds he shall be good and stable, Wise of speech and reasonable; Whoso that day goes thieving about, He shall be punished with doubt; And if sickness that day betide, It shall quickly from thee glide.

April, June, and September Thirty days have as November; Each month else doth never vary From thirty-one, save February, Which twenty-eight doth still confine, Save on leap year, then twenty-nine.

If Saturday's moon Come once in seven years, It comes too soon.

HOLLANTIDE, 1st NOVEMBER

If ducks do slide at Hollantide, At Christmas they will swim; If ducks do swim at Hollantide, At Christmas they will slide.

If New Year's Eve night wind blows south, It betokeneth warmth and growth; If west, much milk, and fish in the sea; If north, much cold and storms there will be; If east, the trees will bear much fruit; If north-east, flee it man and brute.

January 22nd, Old Style. February 3rd, New Style.

Remember in St Vincent's day If the sun his beams display, 'Tis a token, bright and clear, That you will have a prosperous year.

Remember, remember, The fifth of November, Gunpowder treason and plot, I hope that night will never be forgot. The king and his train Had like to be slain; Thirty-six barrels of gunpowder Set below London to blow London up!

Holla boys! Holla boys! Let the bells ring! Holla boys! Holla boys! God save the King! A stick or a stake For Victoria's sake, And pray ye remember the bonfire night.

Continue Reading →

The compiler M.E.S. Wright states in her preface that this collection aims to gather rhymes 'which for the greater part are not included in other books for the nursery or schoolroom.' Many entries appear with local variations—Essex, Staffordshire, Devonshire, and Norfolk are named—and several were repeated to her by people who could not recall their origin. The volume draws on printed sources such as Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England, Notes and Queries, and Jewitt's Reliquary, alongside named authors like the Taylors, the Lambs, and Mary Howitt.

The rhymes are grouped into sections: Couplets, Weather and Season Rhymes, Baby Songs, Men Women and Children, Beasts Birds etc., Alphabets, Games, and Miscellaneous Rhymes. This structure foregrounds the oral and folk character of the material, with many verses attributed to specific counties or to older printed miscellanies.

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.