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"Mary
had a little lamb, little lamb,
Little lamb, Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere
that Mary went,
Mary went, Mary went,
Everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.
It followed
her to school one day,
School one day, school one day,
It followed her to school one day,
Which was against the rule. |
It
made the children laugh and play,
Laugh and play, laugh and play.
It made the children laugh and play
To see a lamb at school." |
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This
nursery rhyme was first published as a poem by the American writer
Sarah Hale on May 24, 1830. According to Mary Sawyer (later Mrs.
Mary Tyler) which the poem refers to, she kept a pet lamb when
she was a girl, which she took to school one day at the suggestion
of her brother. Visiting school that morning was a young man
by the name of John Roulstone, a nephew of the Reverend Lemuel
Capen. The young man was pleased with the incident of the lamb
that the next day he gave Mary a slip of paper which had written
upon it the three original stanzas of the poem. However, while
one holds that Roulstone wrote the first twelve lines and that
the final twelve lines, more moralistic and much less childlike
than the first, were composed by Sarah Hale; the other is that
mary Hale was responsible for the entire poem. |
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