Great thread,
Clawson was right to call our attention to the work of Iona Opie and her late husband Peter. Their Oxford dictionaries of nursery rhymes and especially their Lore and Language of Schoolchildren belong in the reference libraries of all serious poets.
Pace David Anthony, the aforementioned scholars doubted the Great Plague provenance for "Ring-a-ring o' roses". They can't resist reminding us, however, of the old belief that lucky children could cough or laugh roses.
An example of this rhyme put to profound use is in the final scene of Alban Berg's great opera Wozzek (Janet Kenny, support me on this!). A circle of children, including Wozzek's and Marie's son, plays at this game. The audience knows the boy is newly orphaned by murder and a sort of suicide-by-madness. The rhyme's musical setting seems to underscore the odd mixture of innocence, allegiance-building and bloody cruelty common to many such rhymes. When the circle breaks and the boy walks up-and-offstage to discover his dead mother, the effect in the theatre is shattering.
To give credit where it is due, the use of the game appears in Berg's source material, Georg Buchner's equally great play Woyzek.
My name Michael Slipp (how can I get this changed?)
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