Jaques de Boys, ruminating in Arden on the seven ages of man, describes second childishness as a melancholy affair—toothless, sightless, flavorless—with mere oblivion crowning (and, one hopes, softening) the humiliations of old age. But what if late life constitutes not our second experience of childhood but our third or forth, second childishness occurring as an earlier, happier return to a youthful engagement with the world?

There are some who eagerly and frequently revisit the freedoms and giddy imaginings of childhood; indeed, they never leave them. They are easily identifiable, though their profiles vary widely. (Safe to say any person spending the summer following a jam band around the country is a candidate.) For the rest of us, our children tend to be what leads us back to the strong medicine of fantasy and invention that marked our own first childishness, worked out in riddles, games, and stories, sometimes as songs and frequently in rhyme. But are these merriments and ditties as much fun the second time around?

With regard to children’s literature, and particularly children’s verse, I would say the bag is decidedly mixed. Most parents, I suspect, can’t wait until their kids have chewed through the pabulum of infant rhyming books—those comprising twenty-five words or less and in which the boats always float and the duck invariably goes quack—to a more robust diet of Middlemarch and Philip Larkin. But this, admittedly, misses a step or two.

To smooth over the generation gap, anthologies of poems for children by established poets provide a middle ground: verses pitched at young readers that, nevertheless, provide enjoyment for adults. Since parents are the ones doing the reading (out loud and frequently on demand), this seems a fair compromise; similarly, poets would bore themselves silly without a certain a level of craft and linguistic invention worked into their nursery amusements.

The Oxford anthologies of children’s verse—edited first by the estimable Opies (Iona and Peter), then, as the New Oxford, by Neil Philip, and in America by the recently named poet laureate, Donald Hall—are models in this vein, though not necessarily the place to start. In them, children will make their first acquaintance with Chaucer, Robert Herrick, Christopher Smart, Keats, Longfellow, and the incomparable Robert Louis Stevenson, but nowhere will they encounter that laureate of lullabies, Mother Goose. For “The House that Jack Built” and the like, one must turn to the Opies’ landmark, beautifully researched, and copiously annotated Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951). While this is most certainly the best edition for adults of what in England are called nursery rhymes and in America Mother Goose songs, children may feel the pictures are too infrequent and too quaintly historical. Fortunately, there is no shortage of illustrated editions, portraying Willie Winkie on the lam and Bo Peep in despair, to supplement the Opies’ scholarship.

The rhymes themselves take different forms: there are the rhyming riddles popular in the Renaissance, rhyming alphabets, ancient singing games and amusements, lullabies, ballads, and songs. Many of the rhymes that my daughter, Susannah, now four, has liked the best are accompanied by tunes, such as “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” and “Hush-a-bye, Baby,” the first a primer on industry (“One for my master,/ And one for my dame …”), the second on the harsh realities of physics (“Down will come baby, cradle, and all”). Instruction, both practical and moral, lies at the root of many of these rhymes, but it is delight, both in light, and to a surprising degree, in darkness, that distinguishes them as not just disposable doggerel but as poems in their own right.

“The best of the older [rhymes] are nearer to poetry than the greater part of the Oxford Book of English Verse,” opined Robert Graves, who was himself included in more than one Oxford poetry anthology. About this he is certainly correct. As the Opies write in the introduction to their dictionary, “it can safely be stated that the overwhelming majority of nursery rhymes were not in the first place composed for children; in fact many are survivals of an adult code of joviality, and in their original wording were, by present standards, strikingly unsuitable for those tender years.”

One rhyme that might be pitched a little too high for the wee bairns is this bit of marital shenanigans (in a version from the Everyman’s Library edition of 1910):

I love sixpence, pretty little sixpence,
    I love sixpence better than my life;
I spent a penny of it, I spent another,
    And took fourpence home to my wife.

The husband’s profligacy continues in this cheeky vein until:

Oh, my little two pence, my pretty little twopence,
    I love twopence better than my life;
I spent a penny of it, I spent another,
    ;And I took nothing home to my wife.

Oh, my little nothing, my pretty little nothing,
    What will nothing buy for my wife?
I have nothing, I spend nothing,
    I love nothing better than my wife.

The ending, as I read it, is a wonderfully bitter bit of business, and the double meaning of the last line is both economical and affecting in a way pleasing to adults.

But is this sort of thing, as I read it anyway, too sophisticated for a child? I doubt it. It’s message of fairness and sharing is not lost on my four-year-old, who must now divide her kingdom with two younger brothers. And as far as the concept of spousal responsibility is concerned, Susannah has been proposed to by no fewer than three boys in recent months, so she would do well to make sure that someone keeps bringing their pennies home.

Mother Goose can be strikingly grown-up in its subjects and themes. A tongue-in-cheek study by the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children concluded that the level of accidental and aggressive violence was twice as high in Mother Goose as on television: blind mice maimed with a carving knife, Humpty Dumpty’s great fall, and so on. Then there is the hapless mason:

The barber shaved the mason,
    As I suppose,
    Cut off his nose,
And popped it in a basin.

For a primer on the days of the week, and oh, yes, the breathtaking brutality of fate, there is the sickly, short life of Solomon Grundy:

Soloman Grundy
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
This is the end
Of Solomon Grundy.

This is the kind of condensed and mordant cameo that Edward Arlington Robinson would have been very pleased to have written. Miniver Cheevy seems like an old drinking buddy of Solomon Grundy’s:

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
    Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
    And he had reasons.

Robinson’s poem concludes:

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
    Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
    And kept on drinking.

Dead by Sunday, I would say, seems like a good bet.

Mother Goose rhymes are violent, but not in the sense that television is violent. They are wise and witty, ludicrous and cheeky, funny and caustic—in other words, they are bitten off from human experience in a way that is accessible to both children and adults, eminently memorable, and frequently fantastic. Someone is always being cooked in a pie, and children, of course, eat this up. A kids’ book author I know once worried that he might be on rocky ground with his characterization of a three-legged dog, so asked a group of children about it. “Wow,” they squealed, “what about a one-legged dog?” Kids, you see, can handle it. The spicy subjects of these rhymes is hardly surprising given their origins, though those origins at times have been murky.

Some theories have identified Mother Goose as the Queen of Sheba from Biblical times, or Queen Bertha, the mother of the great medieval military leader Charlemagne. Despite the claims of cranks in Boston, who would attract visitors to the grave of one Elizabeth “Mother” Goose, these nursery rhymes are the product of no one author but an accretion of very old verses passed down orally from as early as the Middle Ages. (Over half are believed to be at least 250 years old.) They have been vetted by the most acute group of editors, children themselves, who recall the best of them and teach them to their own children in time. (If “adult” poems relied for their survival on someone memorizing them and passing them down, almost all would be lost forever.)

As with the best poetry, what makes the poems viable for adults is their music and their particular management of emotion and not their topical interest. On this point the Opies are particularly refreshing: “Much ingenuity has been exercised to show that certain nursery rhymes have had greater significance than is now apparent. They have been vested with mystic symbolism, linked with social and political events, and numerous attempts have been made to identify the nursery characters with real persons. It should be stated straightway that the bulk of these speculations are worthless.” Who knew that the cat in “Hey Diddle Diddle” was in fact Elizabeth I, as has been suggested, or that “Old Mother Hubbard” stands in for Cardinal Wolsey? The baby that tumbles “cradle and all” has been linked to “the Egyptian child Horus, the Old Pretender, and a New England Red Indian.” Worthless speculation, but amusing.

Beyond Mother Goose, the world of children’s verse opens up to the range of what has been written by well-known poets (as one Oxford anthology has it) “for children, or written with children prominently in mind.” Many of these poets are not half so good as Mother Goose herself. On the plus column there is A. A. Milne, Hilaire Belloc, Rudyard Kipling, Christina Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, and, more recently, X. J. Kennedy and Richard Wilbur. In the minus column, we have (thanks to the dubious inclusions of Oxford’s Neil Philip), also-rans such as Benjamin Zephaniah and Edwin Morgan. (J. Bottum has had the final word on Philip’s motley band of lackluster versifyers in his review of the New Oxford in Commentary.) Suffice it to say that upon entering onto this territory one does well to stick to the tried-and-true, and there can be none more true than the eminently humane Robert Louis Stevenson.

Stevenson’s “Bed in Summer,” from his sublime Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), published during the same period as his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, has a pathos that tugs from below at the singing surface of his poems for children:

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

A number of flowers in Stevenson’s garden, such as “The Land of Counterpane” (“When I was sick and lay a-bed”), refer to stints in bed, a place that figured all too prominently in the chronically ailing Stevenson’s own life at the time he wrote these poems. As Stevenson’s biographer Frank McLynn puts it, the poems provide “an outstanding picture of the suppressed wishes, loneliness, anxiety and uncertainty of childhood.”

Not all children’s poems are quite so forlorn. Some occasion pure delight. Others fall short of this mark, sliding into clever-clever cuteness, as in J. Patrick Lewis’s “Is the Yellow Sea Yellow?” In answer to the question, “Is the Dead Sea dead?,” the poem explains: “Yes, it’s dead. No fish, no plants,/ Or any of life’s forms./ It’s no one’s fault . . ./ Just too much salt!” This sort of thing recalls the smarmy shortcomings of certain renowned children’s versifiers such as Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss.

Mother Goose’s brand of light-touch instruction, spiced with a dash of the comic or absurd, is difficult to achieve. Few poems can manage verses that have no designs on our “serious” emotions but can still, through the force of their wit and sparkle, lodge themselves in our memories. One such poem, by a splendid poet sadly overlooked by the Oxford anthologists, is Tom Disch, and in particular (with a nod to Stevenson) his Child’s Garden of Grammar. Disch’s rhymes take as their subject quotation marks, proper nouns, split infinitives, and even “The Agreement of Predicate Pronouns” (a poem useful to certain adults):

“If you were me …” the lad began.
“But that can’t be, my little man,

You must be I with verbs like were.”
He heaved a sigh. “If I were her …”

“Then you’d be she. Let me explain:
The verb to be—” “You’re such a pain!

Suppose I said that I were you?”
“Then you’d be I, and that would do.”

“But you’re just who I would not be.”
“That may be true, but we’d agree,

And that is what pronouns must do.
You’re not me. But—I could be you.”

Revisiting the best of children’s poetry can be refreshing for parents, but it can also be refreshing for poets themselves. Shakespeare made use of them. The strategies, the prosody, and the vision of children’s verse clearly meant a great deal to Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Robert Frost, and countless other “serious” “adult” poets, as well. How could they miss? Five hundred years of four-year-olds could hardly be wrong.