Ring A Ring Of Roses
Ring a ring o roses,
A pocketful of posies,
Atishoo, atishoo,
We all fall down.
What most people don't know is that the meaning of the cheerful nursery rhyme is about death, the plague in particular.
The first line refers to a ring of redness on the body which was one of the first symptoms of the plague.
The second line refers to how people carried around herbs or flowers like posies in their pockets because the smell of dead bodies was overpowering in the streets or to superstitiously ward off the evil spirits that would give them the disease.
The third line is kind of obvious, you sneeze.
The last goes: we all fall down. It really means, we all fall down... dead.
Sorry for this depressing, morbid fact, you might not hear that nursery rhyme again without thinking of the plague, but I thought it was quite interesting.
Martine Moeykens
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