"Star Light, Star Bright" 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 16339.
Lyrics
The lyrics usually conform to the following:
:Star light, star bright,
:First star I see tonight;
:I wish I may, I wish I might
:Have the wish I wish tonight.
Origins
The superstition of hoping for wishes granted when seeing a shooting or falling star may date back to the ancient world.
[ Wishing on the first star seen may also predate this rhyme, which first began to be recorded in late nineteenth-century America.][R. Webster, ''The Encyclopedia of Superstitions'' (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2008), p. 245.] The song and tradition seem to have reached Britain by the early twentieth century and have since spread worldwide.[I. Opie and M. Tatem, ''A Dictionary of Superstitions'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 175-6.]
In popular culture
It is used in the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio and related Disney media
The first half is featured in the chorus of Madonna
Madonna Louise Ciccone (; ; born August 16, 1958) is an American singer-songwriter and actress. Widely dubbed the " Queen of Pop", Madonna has been noted for her continual reinvention and versatility in music production, songwriting, a ...
's song ''Lucky Star Lucky Star, The Lucky Star or Lucky Starr may refer to:
Art, entertainment, and media Anime and manga
* ''Lucky Star'' (manga), a manga, anime, and video game series
* "Lucky Star", one of the Angel Frames from the anime and manga series ''Galaxy ...
''.
In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, it is used as the plot's basis, the quest for the Wishing Star, in addition to providing deeper meaning to the film's central themes. It is read verbatim in the opening and repeated later on.
Notes
{{Portal , Children's literature
American nursery rhymes
Songs about nights