What is the real meaning behind the popular children's song "Ring Around the Rosie"?

peasypod

That would be the connotations concerning the Bubonic Plague. http://www.soundmedicine.iu.edu/segment.php4?seg=138 "Ring Around the Rosy," a common childhood song and dance, is really about one of the deadliest epidemics in all of history — the Bubonic Plague. It claimed millions of victims. The opening words, "Ring around the rosy," represent the skin lesion associated with the disease that appears as a bright red, or rosy, ulcerated spot surrounded by a ring. The next line, "Pocket full of posies," has superstitious origins. Physicians used to carry scented herbs and flowers – usually posies – in front of their noses in an attempt to ward off the plague. Traditional 17th century London physicians wore long robes and a long beaked mask with posies stuffed inside. The final verse, "Ashes, ashes, we all fall down," symbolizes death by the plague. May 13 05, 5:24 PM

gmackematix

What few people realise is that the usual explanation of this rhyme being about the Black Death may be widely known, but it is also totally unsubstantiated piffle. http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.htm Although folklorists have been collecting and setting down in print bits of oral tradition such as nursery rhymes and fairy tales for hundreds of years, the earliest print appearance of "Ring Around the Rosie" did not occur until the publication of Kate Greenaway's Mother Goose or The Old Nursery Rhymes in 1881. For the "plague" explanation of "Ring Around the Rosie" to be true, we have to believe that children were reciting this nursery rhyme continuously for over five centuries, yet not one person in that five hundred year span found it popular enough to merit writing it down. Children were apparently reciting this plague-inspired nursery rhyme for over six hundred years before someone finally figured out what they were talking about, as the first known mention of a plague interpretation of "Ring Around the Rosie" didn't show up until James Leasor published The Plague and the Fire in 1961. So, what does "Ring Around the Rosie" mean, then? Folklorist Philip Hiscock suggests: The more likely explanation is to be found in the religious ban on dancing among many Protestants in the nineteenth century, in Britain as well as here in North America. Adolescents found a way around the dancing ban with what was called in the United States the "play-party." Play-parties consisted of ring games which differed from square dances only in their name and their lack of musical accompaniment. May 13 05, 7:21 PM