Jack and Jill (nursery Rhyme) - Lyrics and Structure

Lyrics and Structure

The first and most commonly repeated verse is:

Jack and Jill went up the hill

To fetch a pail of water.

Jack fell down and broke his crown,

And Jill came tumbling after.

Many verses have been added to the rhyme, including a version with a total of 15 stanzas in a chapbook of the 19th century. The second verse, probably added as part of these extensions has become a standard part of the nursery rhyme. Early versions took the form:

Up Jack got, and home did trot,

As fast as he could caper;

To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob

With vinegar and brown paper.

By the early 20th century this had been modified in some collections, such as L. E. Walter's, Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes (London, 1919) to:

Up Jack got and home did trot,

As fast as he could caper;

And went to bed and bound his head

With vinegar and brown paper.

A third verse, sometimes added to the rhyme, was first recorded in a 19th century chapbook and took the form:

Then Jill came in, and she did grin,

To see Jack's paper plaster;

Her mother whipt her, across her knee,

For laughing at Jack's disaster.

20th century versions of this verse include:

When Jill came in how she did grin

To see Jack's paper plaster;

Mother vexed did whip her next

For causing Jack's disaster.

The rhyme is in made up of quatrains, with a rhyming scheme of abcb (with occasional internal rhymes), using falling rhymes (where the rhyme sound is on a relatively unstressed syllable: de-emphasising the rhyme) and a trochaic rhythm (with the stress falling on the first of a pair of syllables), know as a ballad form, which is common in nursery rhymes. The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded by the composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs (1870). The Roud Folk Song Index, which catalogues folk songs and their variations by number, classifies the song as 10266.