Little Songs — Text and Context

Musical Nonsense and Metrical Variety

Follen explicitly aligns her project with Mother Goose, but her verse shows a more deliberate metrical craft. Each poem is headed by a suggested tune, and the rhythms shift accordingly. 'Annie's Garden' moves in a steady trochaic trimeter: 'In little Annie's garden / Grew all sorts of posies.' By contrast, 'The New Moon' uses a dactylic lilt: 'Dear mother, how pretty / The moon looks to-night!' The nonsense refrains—'Rad-er-er too tan-da-ro te' in 'The Baby's Birthday'—echo the 'musical nonsense' Follen praises. These invented syllables have no semantic weight; they exist purely for sound and play, inviting children to join in without needing to decode meaning. The metrical variety keeps the ear engaged, shifting from the bouncing rhythms of 'Stop! Stop! Pretty Water' to the lullaby cadence of 'Ding Dong! Ding Dong!'

Domestic Settings and Moral Gestures

The poems are anchored in domestic interiors and familiar outdoor spaces: gardens, parlors, farmyards. 'The Poor Man' models charity through concrete actions—'Let us give him some bread to eat'—and physical warmth: 'Let us build it up higher.' The moral is embedded in the situation, not stated as a rule. In 'The Little Boy's Good Night,' the child addresses family members, pets, and even flowers, ending with 'an evening prayer.' The poem's structure—a series of good nights—creates a ritual of gratitude and connection. Follen's animals often mirror human behavior: the kittens who lose their mittens are scolded but ultimately forgiven. The moral weight falls lightly; the pleasure of the rhyme and the familiarity of the scene carry the lesson.

Animal Characters and Direct Address

Animals appear frequently, often speaking or being spoken to directly. In 'The Three Little Kittens,' the kittens' dialogue—'O mother dear, / We very much fear / That we have lost our mittens'—is followed by the mother's scolding and their plaintive 'Mee-ow, mee-ow, mee-ow.' The poem uses repetition and onomatopoeia to dramatize a small domestic crisis. 'Ding Dong! Ding Dong!' addresses a bird, a mouse, and a cat in successive stanzas, each introduced with the same refrain. The child narrator claims the bird 'sang to me' and the mouse 'looked very cunning.' This direct address collapses distance between child and animal, treating creatures as conversational partners. Follen's diction remains simple—'speckled all over,' 'very pretty'—but the cumulative effect is a world where animals have agency and children observe them with affectionate attention.

The Child's Voice and the Natural World

Several poems adopt a first-person child speaker, giving the collection a consistent youthful perspective. In 'The Little Boy's May Day Song,' the child exclaims, 'The flowers are blooming every where' and 'I feel as glad as they.' The mother's reply—'Go forth, my child, and laugh and play'—endorses this joy as divinely sanctioned: 'For He who made this blooming earth / Smiles on an infant's joy.' The natural world is presented as a source of delight and moral instruction: brooks 'dance along,' lambs 'bleat and frisk,' butterflies 'are coming out.' The child's voice is not sentimentalized but energetic and curious. In 'The Little Boy's Good Night,' the speaker wishes he understood the birds' language: 'Perhaps you sing, Good night.' This moment of imaginative reach—wishing to cross species boundaries—is typical of Follen's approach: she respects the child's perspective while gently expanding it.

Follen's Little Songs rewards attention to its small formal choices: the way a tune dictates a rhythm, the placement of a nonsense refrain, the shift from third-person narrative to first-person address. The poems are best read aloud, with the suggested tunes in mind, to hear how Follen balances instruction with play. Readers may notice how consistently she returns to the child's physical world—gardens, pets, bedtime—and how rarely she ventures into fantasy. The collection is a record of a particular pedagogical moment, when nursery rhymes were being refashioned for moral and aesthetic purposes, and it retains the freshness of a poet who trusted her young audience to enjoy both sense and sound.

That gray afternoon, Little Songs sat open beside me, and I kept thinking how its gentle rhymes never pushed a child too hard—just nudged toward kindness. Rain tapping the window, I started wondering about other hidden, modest lives, and my hand drifted to Thrills of a Bell Boy — Background and Themes. Both felt like quiet rooms where small voices mattered most.