Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book

by Christina Rossetti

Good poetry for children is rare. Few collections, few single poems in fact, survive beyond a few years of popularity. There are exceptions — the poetry and verse of Walter de la Mare, Lewis Carroll, and Edward Lear come to mind. Still rarer is successful children's poetry by a poet known equally for other work, such as Christina Rossetti.
These verses — deceptively simple, light, often like a nursery rhyme in character — consider such topics as childhood activities, children's cruelty and gentleness, roses and wild flowers, nesting birds and farm animals, cold winter and blossoming spring. Many pose riddles and conundrums ("A hill has no leg, but has a foot;/A wine-glass a stem, but not a root").
This is the only edition in print to reproduce the poems with the illustrations which originally accompanied them. Engravings by Arthur Hughes, one of the best-known illustrators of the Victorian era, catch the mood of each verse.
Sing-Song is a fitting name for this many of the verses capture the cadence of the ballad. Children will enjoy their music. Parents will find the simple content and lyrical language of the verses ideal for reading aloud.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Victorian, Childrens

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1872

About the author

Christina Georgina Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote lyrical religious works and ballads, such as "Up-hill" (1861).

Frances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.

Dante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement.

When failing health and eyesight forced the professor into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother started a day school, attempting to support the family, but after a year or so, gave it away. Thereafter, a recurring illness, diagnosed as sometimes angina and sometimes tuberculosis, interrupted a very retiring life that she led. From the early 1860s, she in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.

All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.

After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer.

Reviews

[Melody Schwarting]

Having grown up on a steady diet of Victorian children's literature, these poems feel familiar even though I haven't encountered them in this form before. Each one is illustrated beautifully by Arthur Hughes. The usual suspects are here: nature, mortality, please-sleep-through-the-night-baby-but-don't-die, riddles, rhymes. A little treasure from a favorite poet.

[Elaine]

Read aloud for AO Year 2. Some of these we loved, especially the ones with word play. I started previewing after a few “sleeping” baby poems and skipping those that were too sad for us. Cy and the other kids were excited when we finally reached their recitation poem “Who has seen the wind?”

[thehalcyondaysofsummer]

Opening lines: ‘Angels at the foot, And angels at the head, And like a curly little lamb, My pretty babe in bed.’

[Summer]

This was a read-aloud. The poems were good, a good part of them were helpful/useful information poems, which will be good for recitation. It was not my favorite but it was not bad.

[Jean Bowen]

How Many times have you read Sing-Song?
Seven times Ten!
How many rhymes do you know and love?
Dozens and Dozens!




-Mrs. Karl T. Cooper, Jr.

[Shannon]

On my quest to read every poem Christina Rossetti ever wrote, I used this book during Morning Time for my girls' home school. The poems are all untitled and fairly short, so rather than reading one a day, we read a page of them a day. They loosely followed themes: poems about seasons or bedtime or flowers would all be grouped together. They were all lovely, often with simpler rhyme schemes than her poems for grown-ups. Some of them were dear, some were sad, and some gave me that same feeling of gazing at eternal truth that I get from her grown-up canon. Here is my favorite:

What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.
What are brief? today and tomorrow.
What are frail? Spring blossoms and youth.
What are deep? the ocean and truth.

[Amy Mauney]

Christina Rossetti has a few good poems, but overall, not my favorite poet.

[Sheryl]

Didn't grow up with this book, but I'm reading the Wordsworth collection The Works of Christina Rossetti and about halfway through I realized it was going to ignore her kids' poems entirely, which is outrageous. So I read this one as well.

Did grow up on Best In Children's Books, which had many gems from this collection -- "Who Has Seen the Wind?" "One and One Are Two" "How Many Seconds in a Minute?" etc. -- and I'd picked up other snippets here and there. I don't love all of these poems, but I do love many of them.

Not sure what I think of the collection as a whole. In an era when women faced odds of one in eight of dying in childbirth and half of all kids didn't make it to their fifth birthday all the poems about death make sense, but in our day and age they're a bit much. If I were reading this with kids I'd drop at least half of them.

[Marmar]

Some of these poems were shockingly dark. Did not expect that from a "nursery rhyme book." I found this on Pinterest of all places 😂 and archive.org had the full thing courtesy of the New York public library 🥳

[Kathryn Baron]

I was given this as a child. I don't remember loving any of the poems - or even liking them particularly. Although I did very carefully colour in several illustrations. But the language and images certainly became part of my mental landscape.

[raven ♡˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆]

"poor little timid furry man"
another uni reading ! maybe im just not the target audience for 19th century nursery rhymes
also i wish the pages were titled! at first i was lost thinking it was one long nonsensical rhyme

[David Drucker]

Some nice poetry; a sort of alternative Mother Goose - I think I would like to set some of it to music.

[j e rodriguez]

"A rose has thorns as well as honey..."

[kae !!]

un día christina rossetti se levantó y decidió escribir los poemitas más monos del mundo la quiero tanto!!

[Misa]

Read for Victober Readathon. It is for the challenge: book that plays with form. Some poems were cute and funny and some others were a bit sad but I liked it.

[Abigail]

Tea time reading. Lovely, sweet children's poems.

[Gabby]

Read for Form 1b. Some of these were big favorites. Overall, not quite as enjoyable as Robert Louis Stevenson or A.A. Milne.

[Arub]

ON | 1. 1915 poem published in Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme, Macmillan and Co., with illustrations by ARTHUR HUGHE: “Who has seen the wind? / Neither I nor you; / But when the leaves hang trembling, / The wind is passing through. // Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I; / But when the trees bow down their heads, / The wind is passing by.” : WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND | 2. 2013 Studio Ghibli adaption of TATSUO HORI’S The Wind Has Risen, and translated by GARY RYDSTROM: “Who has seen the wind? / Neither I nor you: / but when the leaves hang trembling, / the wind is passing through. // Let the wind carry these wings, / carry these wings to you.” : THE WIND RISES BY HAYAO MIYAZAKI.

—
Mon. Jul 26. 2025.

| 3. RENÉ DESCARTES, 2009 Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, as translated by MICHEAL MORIARTY. : CEREBRAL.

If words are oil,
then CHRISTINA ROSSETTI’S “Who Has Seen the Wind?”
is slick in emuls refuse.

And it is from within such refusal I write:

         with words in stain;
         elastic and treble,
         and carp.

For, I will pass, and oil will lift: CEREBRAL IN FACT.

And the wind will not be seen;
for, it will simply,
just,
be.

—
Mon. Jul 26. 2025.

| 4. al-Qurʿān, (revealed to the PROPHET MUḤAMMAD (SAW.) through the Angel JIBRĪL (AS.) c. 610–632 CE; compiled by ZAYD IBN THĀBIT (RA.) c. 632–634 CE; standardised in ræsm by ʿUTHMĀN IBN ʿAFFĀN (RA.) c. 650 CE.) sūrah 36 (Ya-Sīn), 82. : KUN FA-YAKŪN.

Who Has Seen the Wind? by CHRISTINA ROSSETTI;

         I,
         and perhaps you too,

much do admire.

For is not the body an
arrangement by water?

         And if words are oil,
         then a poem must float,
         cerebral in mind.

And,

         then I,
         and perhaps you too,

         do wonder:

         is it only once the mind is free,
         from oil,
         can the wind be seen?

         Where,
         seen is not seen,
         but to simply,

                 just,

                 be.

         And to be is kun fa-yakūn
         —BUT AS RETRUN.

Though,
in such a return there is much sorrow.

For words are all I,
and perhaps you too,

have ever known.

[Aletheia Ubben]

With a little patience and an open mind these old-fashioned poems can be enjoyable for parents and children of many ages. Some of them capture the charm and beauty of babies. Others celebrate the beauty of the every-day natural world or pose thought-provoking moral lessons. (Aletheia's review: The sound of baby nails on paper made Mom's teeth hurt, but since I have no teeth yet I thought it was fun. Some of the poems made Mom hug and kiss me.)

[Rachel Behrends]

This contains a lot of lovely, enjoyable, and even informative poems and rhymes to help learn facts about nature. However, there are several stories of dead babies that were very sad to read, but I suppose they are expected from infant mortality rate at the time when they were written. Can be very distressing to sensitive children.

[Kara]

"And if thou wilt remember and if thou wilt forget" brings me to tears every time

[Meredith Henning]

Read off and on to Sean-Paul :)

[Tasha]

March 2013

[Colleen]

Most of these were pretty depressing. The illustrations are nice.

[Melusine Parry]

More than unconvinced.

[Jacob]

Sing – Song is an old nursery book filled with many rhymes and poems for children. The book has a collection of animals, flowers, activities and seasons.