What's the story behind the song ''Ring Around The Rosie"?

Answer 1

it is from the black plague children would sing it in the streets around the fallen dead on the street. ring around the rosie describes the rings of redness they would develop. pockets full of posies is actually pockets of puss that formed during the illness. ashes ashes is of course the dead being burned to keep the sickness from spreading.

Answer 2

Like Ding Dong Bell, Little Jack Horner, and One Two Buckle my Shoe it is just a children's song with no historical significance. Check this from snopes.com:
"Although folklorists have been collecting and setting down in print bits of oral tradition such as nursery rhymes and fairy tales for hundreds of years, the earliest print appearance of "Ring Around the Rosie" did not occur until the publication of Kate Greenaway's Mother Goose or The Old Nursery Rhymes in 1881. For the "plague" explanation of "Ring Around the Rosie" to be true, we have to believe that children were reciting this nursery rhyme continuously for over five centuries, yet not one person in that five hundred year span found it popular enough to merit writing it down. (How anyone could credibly assert that a rhyme which didn't appear in print until 1881 actually "began about 1347" is a mystery. If the rhyme were really this old, then "Ring Around the Rosie" antedates even Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and therefore we would have examples of this rhyme in Middle English as well as Modern English forms.)"

Answer 3

A common conjecture is that the rhyme is somehow connected to the Great Plague of London in 1665, or perhaps earlier outbreaks of bubonic plague in England. This story is entirely unsupported by textual sources, as there is no mention of the verses, nor written evidence of their existence, before 1881.

This idea, however, remains entrenched in the imagination of many. Detailed explanations have evolved to explain the different parts of the poem. For example, the first line evokes the round red rash that would break out on the skin of plague victims. The second line's "pocket full of posies" would have been a pocket in the garment of a victim filled with something fragrant, such as flowers that aimed to conceal the smell from the sores and the dying people. A second creative explanation for this line is that it referred to the purported belief that fresh-smelling flowers, nosegays, and pomanders would purify the air around them thus warding off disease. A third possibility includes the idea that "posies" are derived from an Old English word for pus, in which case the pocket would be referring to the swelling sore.

"Ashes, ashes" would refer to when people alive and dead were gathered up into piles and lit on fire in a belief that burning the diseased bodies would not allow the disease to spread. Several alternate endings to the song exist, one being: "atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down", intepreted as invoking the sneezing before "we all fall down", the eventual succumbing to death.

The first time the nursery rhyme was suggested to be plague related seems to be in 1961, James Leasor's book The Plague and the Fire. However, it is not clear whether Leasor concocted the plague interpretation on his own.

Folklorist Philip Hiscock suggests that the more likely explanation is to be found in the religious ban on dancing among many Protestants in the nineteenth century, in Britain as well as here in North America. Adolescents found a way around the dancing ban with what was called in the United States the "play-party." Play-parties consisted of ring games which differed from square dances only in their name and their lack of musical accompaniment. They were hugely popular, and younger children got into the act, too. Some modern nursery games, particularly those which involve rings of children, derive from these play-party games. "Little Sally Saucer" (or "Sally Waters") is one of them, and "Ring Around the Rosie" seems to be another. The rings referred to in the rhymes are literally the rings formed by the playing children. "Ashes, ashes" probably comes from something like "Husha, husha" (another common variant) which refers to stopping the ring and falling silent. And the falling down refers to the jumble of bodies in that ring when they let go of each other and throw themselves into the circle.

The rhyme was first published in Kate Greenaway's Mother Goose or The Old Nursery Rhymes (1881), centuries after the plague swept Europe; and there is no evidence of an earlier version. Further, many early versions of the rhyme omit the lines used to support these refereces to the plague. The plague connection is considered false by scholars of folklore.

Answer 4

It comes from the tiem of the Bubonic plague in Europe.
Ring around the rosey describes the lesions the appeared on peoples bodies.

Pockets full of poseys refers to the flowers people carried around to ward off the stench of death and decaying flesh.

Ashes, ashes all fall down refers to the ashen color of the flesh of people just before they die. Strange how the most morbid of things can become a childrens game.

Answer 5

It's about the black death (bubonic plague). "Ring around the rosie" refers to the red rash with a ring around it that signalled a person had been infected. "A pocket full of posies" refers to the belief that carrying flowers in one's pocket would ward off the plague. "Husha husha" is probably a corruption of "Achoo achoo", a reference to sneezing that was thought to be final stages of the plague before "We all fall down" (dead).

Answer 6

A common conjecture is that the rhyme is somehow connected to the Great Plague of London in 1665. Did you know that the words change or verses are added depending on where you are. See this site for more information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_around_a_rosie

Answer 7

This was from the era of the Black Death. This was used as a enchantment to protect oneselve during the frightful years of the plague.

Answer 8

I always heard that when the black death was going on, they filled their pockets full of flowers to mask the stench from the dead bodies...I think they burned the bodies too because they feared of the spread of the disease...