who's the author?

Question

I learned this in 4th grade english, and its on my mind who wrote it. we were taught it is called a no-nonsense poem......
One gay day in the middle of the night,
two dead boys came out to fight,
back to back they faced eachother,
turned around and shot one another,,
a deaf policeman heard this noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.
if you think this lie is true ,
ask the blind man he saw too.

mathlady, is the bomb I learned this 40 yrs ago and her version and explanation is thee best!!

Answer 1

This particular page of the British Columbia Folklore Society's web site was begun following an article that we ran in the experimental first issue of the Society's Newsletter (April 2001)—and not in the Society Journal B.C. FOLKLORE, as previously stated—in which we cited four, composite verses of the "Two Dead Boys" rhyme instigated by a variant told to us by David Fleetwood of Cowichan Station. David was born in British Columbia in 1929 and worked as a cat-skinner in logging camps for most of his life. He remembered his grandfather reciting the poem but said his own recollection of it was not complete. After checking out various sources, including the Opies [the authors Iona and Peter] and the Web, we compiled and published the four, composite verses given below and asked our readers for any further input.

The folklorist and writer Ed Cray, writing to others on an Internet ballad chat line, noted that the rhyme was a "Ballad of Impossibilities" and that, "A number of these songs/ballads of impossibilities were printed as broadsides in the 18th and 19th centuries. At least one, The Derby Ram is/was well known in the 20th Century, and Peggy Seeger introduced another during the folk song revival, Little Brown Dog, culled from her mother's anthology of Animal Folk Songs for Children."

Professor Cray then asks, "Can anyone provide, first, a tune for the children's rhyme "One Fine Day" and thus turn a poem into a song; and, second, can members of the list provide references to other songs of impossibilities?"


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INTRODUCTION
Although the Two Dead Boys poem (“One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night”) is often referred to as a nonsense rhyme, the description is not strictly accurate. It is clearly understandable in any of its many forms and versions and the impossibilities in the story are no more than sensible words and phrases that have been transposed. An example of a true nonsense rhyme can be seen for instance in the first four lines of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking Glass, which goes:


‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
One can get a feeling for the severe, gathering darkness of the poem from Carroll’s introductory lines but, until Humpty Dumpty explains it in its entirety, the poem, and particularly these first four lines, makes no sense at all.

As to the history of “One Fine Day…” it appears to have evolved from tangle-worded couplets that have been popular in Miracle Plays and the folklore and folksongs of the British Isles since the Middle Ages. Tiddy, in his book The Mummers’ Play [1923, Oxford, Oxford University Press], cites the earliest known example of this type of humour as appearing in the manuscript of Land of Cockaigne about 1305 [Tiddy 1923, p. 116] and a 15th century manuscript in the Bodleian Library [MS Engl. poet. e. 1: c.1480] includes four lines that are directly related to our rhyme. These can be translated into modern English as:


I saw three headless [men] playing at a ball,
A handless man served them all.
While three mouthless men laughed,
Three legless [men] from them ran.
In a similar form the lines remained in Scottish tradition to the mid 19th century in the Lying Song [Shoolbraid, Bairnsangs, unpublished manuscript, 2004].

The 16th century English folksong Martin Said to his Man is a drunken exchange of impossibilities between a master and his servant, each of whom is attempting to outdo the other. The song includes such lines as:


"I saw a mouse chase a cat, saw the cheese eat a rat"

and

"I saw a maid milk a bull, every pull a bucket full"
In one form or another the modern version of Two Dead Boys, including many of the orphan pieces found below, has been collected from children in playgrounds since the middle of the 19th century. A detailed study with examples collected throughout the British Isles since the turn of the 20th century can be found in Iona and Peter Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren [1959, Oxford. Oxford University Press, pp. 24-29].

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"One fine day in the middle of the night" (Journal Versions)


One fine day in the middle of the night,

Two dead boys* got up to fight, [*or men]

Back to back they faced each other,

Drew their swords and shot each other,


One was blind and the other couldn't, see

So they chose a dummy for a referee.

A blind man went to see fair play,

A dumb man went to shout "hooray!"


A paralysed donkey passing by,

Kicked the blind man in the eye,

Knocked him through a nine inch wall,

Into a dry ditch and drowned them all,


A deaf policeman heard the noise,

And came to arrest the two dead boys,

If you don't believe this story’s true,

Ask the blind man he saw it too!


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A great deal of electronic mail has been sent to us about the rhyme since we first uploaded this page. The material that follows is an analysis of the line variants followed by a composite version and the analysis of a rhyme (Ladies and gentlemen, hoboes and tramps) that is known by at least half of our correspondents as the leadup to the "Two Dead Boys". However, whether it is a separate rhyme that has been added later to give the original poem more body or is part of the original that has been forgotten by many is a moot point at this late stage. The difficulties with trying to justify linking the parts and calling them a single poem revolve particularly round the inconsistencies with meter and rhyme, and with the orphan lines that still cannot be paired.

Line Analysis 1

The version of the "Two Dead Boys" rhyme given above is clearly not the original way it was composed, even though it includes a great many of the popular elements remembered and recited. Amongst the more obvious inconsistencies are the number of blind men and the problem of which of them the donkey kicked in the eye. That aside, a look at the variants in line composition that have been sent to us by our readers is illuminating, to say the least. Clearly many people are quite prepared to accept both unequal meter in the lines and lines that simply don't rhyme as being an acceptable aspect of this poem even though the structure of folk poetry very rarely occurs outside strict poetic boundaries.

Answer 2

Don't know the author, but I did hear a little bit different version that sounds much better...
One dark, bright, stormy night
2 dead soldiers rose to fight
Back to back, they faced each other,
drew out their knives, and shot each other...

the rest escapes me, but it's very fun I think. lol

Answer 3

Honestly, I have no idea.

But I think the first person to answer gave you the answer. It was a good poem though. :]

-ELaine