Now, confess to meeting readers each year in my university classes who are content to say this rhyme jauntily, without manifesting a desire to know where it came from or what it is about. We know that someone someplace and at some time made up this rhyme, just as we know Lewis Carroll made up Alice's Adventures in Wonderland while living in Oxford in the 1860s or William Wordsworth made up The Prelude in stages between 17 and then tinkered with it until he died forty-five years later, and knowing this prompts us to speculate on or investigate the rhyme's origins. We all know that rhymes, for children or for adults, are not found beneath trees nor do they emerge fully formed, pristine and transparent, from mysterious vaults presided over by powerful publishers. But of course that, dear reader, is not that. We accept this truth to be self-evident: to dissect is to murder.
We want our children's literature-we want our children-to signify the truth of an absolute beginning when nothing needed to be explained, analyzed, scrutinized, or interpreted. The rhyme appears to exist in a timeless zone it actualizes a freedom that confirms our hope that onceĢ upon a time purity and innocence were ours. Further, we do not have a date of composition, something that is usually available when a work of literature comes to us from a named author. No author's name comes tagged to this rhyme, and consequently we need not worry ourselves about unconscious expressions of an author's anxieties or wishes. Nothing complicated lurks between the lines nothing polysemous calls out to us from the nine different words. ts brevity, its bounce, and its bumptious fun mark it suitable for children. But how do we know this is literature for the very young child? Our calling it a "nursery rhyme" indicates that we think it is suitable for children, and indeed this rhyme appears in countless collections of such rhymes lavishly illustrated and marketed for a child audience.
offer it as an example of writing we think of as children's literature, an example of literature for the very young child. Here is a simple, well-known nursery rhyme. 1 1 Beginnings Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over The candle stick.
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