The name “Mother Goose” seems to have entered English from French fairy tales. But once John Newbery’s press published “Mother Goose’s Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle” (probably in the early 1780s), her name became forever associated in English with traditional children’s verse — that strange and wonderful body of old, anonymous counting rhymes, nonsense, political chants that had lost their meaning, and rhythmic folklore. In “There Was an Old Woman Tossed Up in a Blanket,” we get eight lines of tetrameter weirdness, rhymed abcb on an assonance rhyme in the first four lines, and dddd, a monorhyme in the second four lines — all to tell the story of an old housewife who thinks the sky needs a little tidying up.

There Was an Old Woman Tossed Up in a Blanket
by Unknown (a Mother Goose verse)

There was an old woman tossed up in a blanket,
Seventy times as high as the moon.
What she did there, I cannot tell you,
But in her hand she carried a broom.
Old woman, old woman, old woman, said I,
O whither, O whither, O whither so high?
To sweep the cobwebs from the sky,
And I shall be back again by and by.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, The Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.