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There Was a Crooked Man
There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile:
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
Nursery rhymes are our gateway to poetry. Colorful, prankish, and full of boisterous mirth, they are passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, just for the sheer fun of it. With their jingling-jangling rhythms, repetitions, and refrains they transport us to a world of four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, Old Mother Hubbard, and the cow that jumped over the moon. It’s a world of possibility, strangeness, and wonder.
There Was a Crooked Man first appeared in print in 1846 after being collected by the Shakespearean scholar James Halliwell Phillips. Rather like the Brothers Grimm in Germany, he was keen to preserve many of the traditional fairy tales and nursery rhymes of England—no doubt influenced by the Romantic movement’s celebration of rural life and folk wisdom.
(Liza Voronin/The Epoch Times )
The poem is likely to go back much further into time than 1846. In fact, it is believed that the crooked man refers to the Scottish general, Sir Alexander Leslie, who two centuries earlier had helped to defeat the English forces of Charles I—but who, after the king was beheaded, fought on the Royalist side. Crooked indeed. In this interpretation, the crooked house refers to the eventual peace between the two warring nations.
Yet this historical background hardly does justice to the freshness of the poem as we read it right now—here, in the timeless present. The crooked man leaps off the page into our imagination, a lopsided body, wonky nose, and bandy legs, zig-zagging hither and thither with his arms akimbo.
We see his crookedness in his appearance, but in what way does it reflect his character? Is he crafty, cracked, or simply a charming kook? To modern ears, the first line echoes the phrase “to walk a mile in someone’s shoes,” reminding us not to criticize a man before we know what he has suffered.
Walking his “crooked mile,” the crooked man strikes gold. His treasure is the “crooked sixpence” he finds against a “crooked stile.” Who hasn’t picked up a grubby coin from the ground, believing it to be a sign of good luck? The stile marks the point where our angular friend must do a hop, a skip, or a jump to make it to the next field. Our own meandering trek through life is full of such obstacles and opportunities.
Disdaining all practical investments, the crooked man does something much more sensible. He buys a cat. This detail evokes the figure of Dick Whittington, the penniless boy who—accompanied by his trusty feline companion—became the Lord Mayor of London in medieval times. A hero in a hundred Christmas pantomimes, he remains a perennial symbol of quick wits and honest work triumphing over the odds.
The crooked man walking his crooked mile sounds terribly isolated. Yet by the end of these four lines, we seem to see him beaming out of the window of his tumbledown shack—for all the world as if he were in a palace, content with the topsy-turvy fellowship of his frolicking pets. (The cat is clearly an eccentric creature, preferring to live together with the mouse rather than gobble it up!) By staying true to his crooked vision, the crooked man does surprisingly straighten out his days. Perfection is not only a pipe dream—it’s boring to boot.
Yet perhaps it is by avoiding perfection that we arrive at paradise. In its jaunty way, the nursery rhyme illustrates one of William Blake’s most famous sayings: “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.” The crooked man pursues his crookedness to the point where he becomes blissfully conventional—which may, in turn, suggest just how rebellious being conventional really is. If we look, romantic adventure is always to be found in the most regular of things: a penny; a cat; even the life behind our respectable front door.
