I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 3 3deference. Few works could be more profoundly political. ‘Baa Baa
Black Sheep’ makes Marx’s Capital look like Mary Poppins.
Would anyone think this was true? It is hard to imagine so. The
reading of the piece I have just offered would seem too ridiculous
even to consider. Quite apart from its fancifulness, it overlooks the
question of genre. The nursery rhyme is a specific genre or type of
literature, and like any genre it has its peculiar rules and conven-
tions. One of these is that such verses are not supposed to mean
very much. It is a mistake to treat them as though they were
Goethe’s Faust or Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. They are ritualised
songs, not diagnoses of the human condition. Nursery rhymes are
communal chants, flights of fancy and forms of verbal play. They
sometimes consist of a collection of images which seem fairly
random, and are not expected to display much narrative coherence.
There is something oddly inconsequential about their storylines
(think of ‘Little Miss Muffet’, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ or ‘Goosey
Goosey Gander’), as though they are half- remembered fragments
of longer narratives that have been lost in the mists of time. ‘Hey
Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle’ is an Eliotic cluster of
cryptic images which refuse to form a unified narrative. To read
these rhymes as though they were Bleak House or The Duchess of
Malfi is as much a mistake as to measure Paul McCartney against
Mozart. They are simply distinct modes. Verses of this kind are full
of minor puzzles and obscure allusions. ‘Humpty Dumpty’, for
example, seems to think it worth mentioning that the king’s horses
failed to reassemble an egg, even though no horse on historical
record has been known to do that.
All this, however, does not settle the question of whether the
verse can be read in the way I have proposed. This, let us note, is
not the same as asking whether it was composed to be read in this