A Personal Book and a Tribute

Tail Feathers from Mother Goose is a delightful and unexpected variation for the Opies. Iona and her husband, the late Peter Opie, began collecting, studying, and writing about children's folklore in the 1940s, and over the ensuing years they published significant studies in the field, including that path-breaking work of scholarship, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Along the way, they also ventured into the complex world of nursery rhymes, those short verses that come from both oral and literary traditions, and that can be about almost any subject, from politics to preferences of diet.

In 1951, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes appeared, with its more than 400 pages containing some 500 rhymes, and 1955 saw the publication of The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, a 250-page collection of over 800 rhymes. Both volumes received enthusiastic critical praise for their excellence as reference works. More recently, two of the Opies' other collections, The Oxford Book of Children's Verse (1973) and The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse (1983), have commented authoritatively on classic literary verse for children, while A Nursery Companion (1980) provided a historical view of early-nineteenth-century rhymes, fables, proverbs, and other works for children, accompanied by hundreds of period illustrations.

All of those nursery-rhyme books were labors of rigorous scholarship, however enjoyable they were for both the Opies and their readers. But Tail Feathers from Mother Goose is obviously and thoroughly a labor of love, a book much more for parents and children than for scholars. These "cordials and simples," writes Iona Opie in her foreword to the volume, "provide comfort for the heart or an antidote to melancholy, fit for adult and child." These small poems, she continues, can "cure moments of ennui and black desperation, or grace moments of exuberance or tranquility" (6). What she says is not only true of the poems in this book but also of the book itself, in its unique combination of largely unknown poems from the Mother Goose tradition and original pictures from many of the best illustrators working for children today. At a time when there are a number of fine collections of familiar rhymes (among them, the Opies'), the refreshing quality about Tail Feathers from Mother Goose is that it is a collection of unfamiliar rhymes only.

Nowhere in this book will the reader find "Mary Had a Little Lamb," "Little Jack Horner," "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater," or any of the other rhymes one might expect in a typical nursery-rhyme book. "Ride a Cock Horse" is here, but not in its usual version. In Tail Feathers it is called "Riding to Market":

Ride a cock-horse to Coventry Cross,    To see what Emma can buy;A penny white cake I'll buy for her sake,    And a twopenny apple pie.

[76]

Some traditional riddles have been included, like the following, whose answer is, "The Wind":

I went to town,And whooo went with me?I went up and downBut nobody could see.

[113]

But by and large, this is a highly idiosyncratic collection, as fresh and funny as the illustrations from "Dinner Table Rhymes" (86-87) that the illustrator Bob Graham spreads across two pages to show a family's table with all its crumbs and the family dog licking the pie-stained baby clean. The final ditty captures the lively, playful spirit of so many of the verses in the book:

Here's good bread and cheese and porter,    Here's good bread and cheese and porter;You all may sing a better song    But you cannot sing a shorter!

Many of the poems that the Opies have included are personal favorites, collected over the years from their fieldwork or sent to them by people who knew of the Opies' studies. Others sent the Opies...