The dark side of your favorite nursery rhyme
FitzGerald’s version goes:
Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.
We’ve all taken part in that familiar kindergarten game — kids forming a circle, clasping hands, joyously singing before collapsing to the ground with the final line. In my youth, I never really knew what the exact words were and what they meant I’d mumble my way through, turning “ring-a-round” into “ringa ringa,” “rosies” into “roses,” and “posies” into “poses.” The third line was just a jumble of nonsense, a mystery we could never decipher.
Recently, while engrossed in Dan Brown’s “Inferno,” I stumbled upon a reference to the same song. According to one theory, endorsed by Dan Brown, the rhyme traces its roots to the Great Plague of 1665 in London.
“Allegedly, a ring around the rosie was a reference to a rose-colored pustule on the skin that developed a ring around it and indicated that one was infected. Sufferers would carry a pocketful of posies in an effort to mask the smell of their own decaying bodies as well as the stench of the city itself, where hundreds of plague victims dropped dead daily, their bodies then cremated. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. Ring around the rosie. A pocketful of posies. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down.” — From Dan Brown’s “Inferno”
And a quick search on the internet found me this-
Ring a Ring o’ Roses” might indeed be linked to the 1665 Great Plague of London, with the “rosie” representing the foul rash of bubonic plague sufferers. Often called as “Black Death” this plague killed a third of Europe’s population.
Throughout history, it has been described as a nightmare and even punishment by God.
A plague victim exhibits the following symptoms: pustules (known as buboes) appearing in the groin, armpits, and neck which ooze blood and pus. In the final moments the victim faces acute fever followed by intense vomiting and ultimately death.
The following verse was sung by children beginning in the 18th century, and is still a popular nursery rhyme in present-day.
It describes: the black ring around the buboes (“Ring around the rosie”); the flowers people carried in their pockets to mask the stench of the pustules; the ashes of cremated bodies falling from the sky because death was so very common.
While intriguing, this theory is often dismissed as an urban legend. Yet, the mystery of how such a dark narrative became a children’s play song remains beyond my understanding. The image of children mimicking the deaths of plague victims is a somber representation.
Since the post-World War II era, the rhyme has been associated with the Great Plague, though earlier interpretations made no such connection. The Opies, experts on nursery rhymes, note that the rhyme’s modern English versions, with sneezing and falling down, opened the door for a retrospective link to the Great Plague.
The line “Ashes, ashes” in colonial versions of the rhyme has variously been interpreted as referring to cremation, burning of victims’ houses, or blackening of their skin. This interpretation has seeped into popular culture, with adaptations referring to radiation sickness and even the bombing of Hiroshima.
Ring-a-ring-o’-geranium,
A pocket full of uranium,
Hiro, shima Hiro, shima
All fall down!
So the next time you find children singing this rhyme…well, at least you’d know what it really means.
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Hey there! Thanks for reading so far. If you enjoyed reading this, make sure to clap 50 times( kidding, a few claps would make my day), do comment and share it with someone. Love, Biscuit ❤
