Little Boy Blue
| "Little Boy Blue" | |
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| Song |
"Little Boy Blue" is a popular English-language nursery rhyme, often used in popular culture. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 11318.
Lyrics
A common version of the rhyme is:
Little Boy Blue,come blow your hor;
The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn;
But where is the boy, who looks after the sheep?
He's under a haystack, he's fast asleep.
Will you wake him? No, not I,
For if I do,he's sure to cry.
==Origins and meaning==
The earliest printed version of the rhyme is in Tommy Thumb's Little Song Book (c. 1744), but the rhyme may be much older. It may be alluded to in Shakespeare's King Lear (III, vi) when Edgar, masquerading as Mad Tom, says:
<poem>Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepheard?
Thy sheepe be in the corne;
And for one blast of thy minikin mouth
Thy sheepe shall take no harme.[1]
It has been argued that Little Boy Blue was intended to represent Cardinal Wolsey, who was the son of an Ipswich butcher, who may have acted as a hayward to his father's livestock, but there is no corroborative evidence to support this assertion.[1]
Adaptations
Boy Blue, until issue 81, was one of the main characters of the long-running comic book series Fables.