"Little Poll Parrot" is an English language

nursery rhyme A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and many other countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes. From t ...

. It has a

Roud Folk Song Index The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. It is compiled by Steve Roud (born 1949), a former librarian in the London ...

number of 20178.

Lyrics

Little Miss Muffet "Little Miss Muffet" is an English nursery rhyme of uncertain origin, first recorded in 1805. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 20605. Wording The rhyme first appeared in print in ''Songs for the Nursery'' (1805), and there have been ...

and

Little Jack Horner "Little Jack Horner" is a popular English nursery rhyme with the Roud Folk Song Index number 13027. First mentioned in the 18th century, it was early associated with acts of opportunism, particularly in politics. Moralists also rewrote and expa ...

the verse is an example of a nursery rhyme that contains six dactylic lines. The most common modern version of the lyrics is: :Little Poll Parrot :Sat in his garret :Eating toast and tea; :A little brown mouse :Jumped into the house, :And stole it all away.I. Opie and P. Opie, ''The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes'' (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), p. 353.

Origins

It has been argued that the rhyme originates in the seventeenth century. The earliest printed version was in a collection by James Orchard Halliwell in the 1840s.

Notes

English folk songs English nursery rhymes English children's songs Traditional children's songs Songs about birds Fictional parrots Songs about mice and rats Songwriter unknown Year of song unknown {{folk-song-stub