🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌
to take you, tell ‘em, “bring the army and the navy”
they will need to find a place where they can lay me
sugar in my lungs, sugar knows where i am aching
sugar keeps my love, sugar stays ‘til i am aging
i can think of many reasons you would blame me
i can’t find a single reason you would save me
Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle, and is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg, though he is not explicitly described as such. The first recorded versions of the rhyme date from late eighteenth-century England and the tune from 1870 in James William Elliott’s National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs. Its origins are obscure, and several theories have been advanced to suggest original meanings. As a figure in nursery culture, the character appears under a variety of near-rhyming names, such as Lille Trille (Danish), Wirgele-Wargele (German), Hümpelken-Pümpelken (German) and Hobberti Bob (Pennsylvania Dutch). As a character and literary allusion, Humpty Dumpty was referred to in several works of literature and popular culture in the nineteenth century. Lewis Carroll in particular made him an animated egg in his 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, while in the United States the character was popularised by George L. Fox as a clown of that name in the Broadway pantomime musical Humpty Dumpty (1868). The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg, possibly because it may have been originally posed as a riddle. There are also various theories of an original “Humpty Dumpty”. One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930 and adopted by Robert Ripley, posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted as hunchbacked in Tudor histories and particularly in Shakespeare’s play, and who was defeated, despite his armies, at Bosworth Field in 1485. In 1785, Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue noted that a “Humpty Dumpty” was “a short clumsey person of either sex, also ale boiled with brandy”; no mention was made of the rhyme. The name is also commonly applied to a person in an insecure position or something that would be difficult to reconstruct once broken. Professor David Daube suggested in The Oxford Magazine of 16 February 1956 that Humpty Dumpty was a “tortoise” siege engine, an armored frame, used unsuccessfully to approach the walls of the Parliamentary-held city of Gloucester in 1643 during the Siege of Gloucester in the English Civil War.
