[MacArthur]

(My first experience of poetry...and not bad! We had a collection when I was a child. This guy was a proto-Symbolist, I have no doubt. I would have posted the one about the gingham dog and the calico cat...but it was quite terrifying to me as a kid!)

WYNKEN, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,--
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
and Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe;
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in the beautiful sea--
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish,--
Never afeared are we!"
So cried the stars to the fishermen three,
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam,--
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home:
'Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed
As if it could not be;
And some folk thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea;
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one's trundle-bed;
So shut your eyes while Mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:--
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

[ChrisW]

Boy that takes me back! -- not sure I ever read it -- just had it read to me.
It is charming -- and obviously memorable, since I still remember W, B and N.

[graywyvern]

>This guy

2 women, actually

[MacArthur]

Gray,

Tell me more. Until stumbling across this on the 'net yesterday, I had no idea anyone wrote it. The last time I saw the book, I was too young to read. I recall Peter, Paul and Mary did an arrangement of it.

Andrew

[graywyvern]

i err. i was thinking of:

"Michael Field" is the pseudonym of Katharine Bradley (1846-1913) and her niece, Edith Cooper
(1862-1914).

[Tim Murphy]

Eugene Field (1850-95). American journalist, poet and bibliophile, born in Missouri. He wrote light verse for adults and children, and his colletion A Little Book of Western Verse (1889), which contains "Little Boy Blue" and "Dutch Lullaby" (better known later as "Wynken, Blynken and Nod") had a considerable vogue in England.--Oxford Companion to English Lit.

Although it's a bit on the treacly side, I've had this one by heart since I was four. I've always preferred children's poems that flirt with the macabre, such as this notorious stanza from Tom Lehrer:

She set her sister's hair on fire.
Sing rickety tickety tin.
She set her sister's hair on fire,
and as the flames flew higher and higher
she danced around the funeral pyre,
playing her violin.

[Carol Taylor]

I have no idea who set it to music, but I used to sing Wynken, Blynken, and Nod to my children at bedtime, and still sometimes sing it to my granddaughter. When she ws four and came to stay with us and I inflicted the 8:00 bedtime rule on her, I gave her the choice of being sung to or being read to. She likes both. She won't allow me to sing that song until we've been through all her favorites, though, because she's supposed to drift off in the wooden shoe at the very end. If I start on it too soon she covers her ears.

My own introduction to Eugene Field was The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat and Little Boy Blue, which I memorized along with half the other poems in my mother's One Hundred Favorite Poems when I was tiny.

Carol

[Christopher Mulrooney]

Having known this work only from Disney's symphonic treatment of it, I'm amazed by the symbols, which obviously derive from Poe's "The Haunted Palace" (Washington Irving did me a turn recently in a similar vein).