Real Mother Goose

These aren't just children's verses. They're the surviving fragments of English-speaking culture's earliest poetry, collected and preserved for centuries before anyone thought to write them down. "Real Mother Goose" gathers the rhymes that have lulled, delighted, and baffled generations: the mocking logic of "Hey Diddle Diddle," the political prophecy hidden in "Ring Around the Rosie," the perfect nonsense of "Georgie Porgie." Some are gentle lullabies. Others are surprisingly macabre. All of them are insistently memorable. Whether read aloud to a sleeping child or studied as folklore, these verses possess a strange, ancient magic, the cadence of a language that remembers things older than print. Here is where English begins to rhyme, where counting games become incantations, where a goose flies to the moon and somehow it makes perfect sense.