A primary teacher up in Galway emailed me last week — Mrs. Cusack, lovely woman, she's been using the shrine in her classroom for years and I owe her about forty replies — and she said something that stopped me dead. She said: "Seamus, I never have to TEACH There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. The children teach it to themselves. I just start it and step back."
And I thought, yes. YES. That's the whole thing, isn't it. That's the engine.
If you've never sat down and thought about it properly (and why would you, it's a nursery song, you absorbed it before you had words for absorbing things), here's the shape of the Old Lady. An old woman swallows a fly. We don't know why. Nobody knows why — "perhaps she'll die" is all we get, which, for a children's song, is fierce dark when you say it out loud. Then she swallows a spider to catch the fly. Then a bird to catch the spider. A cat for the bird. A dog for the cat. A goat, a cow. And finally — the punchline of the whole grim little machine — a horse. "She's dead, of course."
Gas, really. The whole song is just a woman making one catastrophic decision after another to fix the last catastrophic decision, and the kids ADORE it. They scream the "perhaps she'll die" bit. Every time.
Now. The reason I'm writing this on a Rattlin' Bog fan site and not, you know, a general nursery-rhyme blog, is that the Old Lady and the bog are cousins. First cousins. Same blood. They're both what folklorists call cumulative songs — songs that build on themselves, verse by verse, each new bit dragging the whole growing pile along behind it.
But here's the thing I want to be honest about, because I think it matters. They build in OPPOSITE directions, and that difference tells you something lovely about both of them.
The Rattlin' Bog builds OUTWARD. Bog, tree, branch, twig, nest, egg, bird, feather, flea. You start with a whole landscape and you zoom in and in and in until you're staring at a single flea on a single feather. It's a telescope going the wrong way. It's joyful. Nothing dies. Everything just nests inside the thing before it, the world folding into itself, smaller and smaller and more and more impossible to say without your tongue falling off. (If you want the full ridiculous chain written out, the lyrics are here.)
The Old Lady builds INWARD, and downward, into one poor woman's stomach. Each verse you add another animal swallowing the last, and the song gets darker and sillier at the exact same rate, which is a hard trick to pull off and most adult songwriters can't do it. The accumulation is the comedy AND the dread. By the time the horse goes in you're both laughing and a small part of you is genuinely sad about the cow.
Same machine. Opposite engines. I find that DEADLY interesting and I will not apologise for it.
Why does it teach itself, though — Mrs. Cusack's point. Here's what I reckon, and I've watched this happen at our schools sessions more times than I can count. A cumulative song is a memory test that gives you the answers as you go. You don't have to remember the spider, the bird, the cat in the right order, because the song hands them back to you on every single verse. By the fourth time round, a six-year-old has heard "to catch the fly" four times. They couldn't forget it now if you paid them. The repetition isn't padding. The repetition IS the lesson, dressed up as a chorus so nobody notices they're learning.
And — this is the bit that gets me — it's self-correcting. If a child forgets the cat, the next verse reminds them. The song catches its own mistakes, like the old lady catching her own mistakes, badly, with a horse. (I wrote more about this teaching-itself quality over in the song that teaches itself, but the Old Lady is honestly the cleaner example of it, because the stakes are so daft.)
There's a version question I should flag, because RattlinFan99 will be in the comments otherwise. Some people sing "Old Woman," some "Old Lady." Some swallow a bird then a cat, some put the cat first. There's a famous Burl Ives recording from the fifties that more or less fixed the order most of us know, but the song's older and murkier than that, and you'll hear it different in different schoolyards. Don't fight about it. There's no canon. There's just the version your nan sang you, which is the correct one, always.
If you teach little ones — or you're just a person who likes thinking about why some songs lodge in your skull for forty years and won't leave — go and look at why cumulative songs work. The Old Lady, the bog, the Twelve Days, Green Grow the Rushes O — they're all running the same beautiful program. Build, repeat, reinforce, escalate, collapse into chaos, come home.
The Old Lady never comes home, mind. She dies, of course. But the kids are already starting it again from the top, swallowing that first fly all over, perhaps to die, perhaps not, world without end.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin the cat would, I'm quite sure, swallow a bird to catch a spider to catch a fly if it meant skipping his dinner schedule by even ten minutes. He has the eyes of a woman who knows exactly what she's doing. I keep him well away from the budgie next door.