As Mr. Tylor observes, no household legend or
nursery rhyme is safe from his hermeneutics. "Should he, for
instance, demand as his property the nursery 'Song of
Sixpence,' his claim would be easily established,--obviously
the four-and-twenty blackbirds are the four-and-twenty hours,
and the pie that holds them is the underlying earth covered
with the overarching sky,--how true a touch of nature it is
that when the pie is opened, that is, when day breaks, the
birds begin to sing; the King is the Sun, and his counting out
his money is pouring out the sunshine, the golden shower of
Danae; the Queen is the Moon, and her transparent honey the
moonlight; the Maid is the 'rosy-fingered' Dawn, who rises
before the Sun, her master, and hangs out the clouds, his
clothes, across the sky; the particular blackbird, who so
tragically ends the tale by snipping off her nose, is the hour
of sunrise." In all this interpretation there is no a priori
improbability, save, perhaps, in its unbroken symmetry and
completeness. That some points, at least, of the story are
thus derived from antique interpretations of physical events,
is in harmony with all that we know concerning nursery rhymes.
In short, "the time-honoured rhyme really wants but one thing
to prove it a sun-myth, that one thing being a proof by some
argument more valid than analogy.
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