Today’s Poem: As I Was Going to St. Ives

Revisiting Mother Goose: still so many questions

St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, on the River Ouse at twilight (Sally Thomas 2002)

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(We’re taking a break, here at Poems Ancient and Modern: our first vacation since we started this newsletter a year and a half ago. But not to leave you in the lurch, we’re offering a week or so of some of our favorites from the archives of the newsletter.)

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As I Was Going to St. Ives

by Anonymous (in Mother Goose)

As I was going to St Ives,
I met a man with seven wives,
Each wife had seven sacks,
Each sack had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits:
Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,
How many were going to St Ives?
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Today’s Poem is a Mother Goose classic, originating in the 18th century. It’s also, of course, a riddle. How many were going to St. Ives? is the obvious question, with its trick answer. But there’s another question the poem raises, even if it doesn’t explicitly ask: Which St. Ives? 

England has not one but two towns called St. Ives. The one in Cornwall, on the Celtic Sea coast north of Penzance, is a resort, recipient of two UK Travel Awards for Best Seaside Town. Incorporated in 1639, and founded on pilchard fishing — which eventually fell off, gutting the town’s economy — this St. Ives underwent its transformation into a tourist mecca with a railroad expansion in 1877. 

We don’t know when exactly the Mother Goose rhyme originated, but an early manuscript version dates from 1730 and goes like this: 

As I went to St Ives
I met Nine Wives
And every Wife had nine Sacs,
And every Sac had nine Cats
And every Cat had nine Kittens.

By 1779, this observation had expanded to become the more familiar riddle, with fewer wives, sacks, and so on. The man whose wives they were wouldn’t turn up until the early Victorian era, presumably to guarantee their virtue. But the question remains: Why would all these people, with their sacks of cats and the progeny of those cats, be coming from St. Ives in Cornwall?

In 1730 it wasn’t a tourist spot. They wouldn’t have been taking the sea air. Though the Irish Saint Ia is said to have landed there in the fifth century, in the Protestant eighteenth century it certainly wouldn’t have been a pilgrimage destination. It wasn’t particularly a market town. Maybe the cats had been hungry for pilchards? Or maybe the fishing was so bad that the whole crowd, having been resident in that St. Ives, had decided to up and leave. It’s possible. But then why would the poem’s speaker be going there? 

Or maybe it wasn’t that St. Ives at all. There is another, now in the borders of Cambridgeshire. Twelve miles north of Cambridge and situated on the River Ouse, it was a market town, originally known as Slepe. Following the putative eleventh-century discovery, in a plowed field, of the remains of the Cornish bishop Ivo of Ramsey, and the subsequent establishment and flourishing of Ramsey Abbey, Slepe became St. Ives and received its charter as a market town. Through the Middle Ages and beyond, its market was one of the largest in England, enduring to the present day. The medieval stone bridge across the Ouse is marked as well by a pilgrim’s chapel. 

It’s no stretch to imagine crowds of people streaming in, crowds of people streaming out. A man with seven wives who are carrying 2,744 felines, total, conveniently divided into sackfuls of 56? Well, okay, frankly, that sounds like a lot of cats to be hauling around the fens, but maybe somebody had been selling them at a bulk discount.

It was a big market, after all. You could go there as a cat-hoarding polygamist and not stand out that much. Alternatively, you could go there as a polygamist meaning to buy pigs; as a reader of this post in its original outing last year noted, swapping cats for pigs in the poke bag was a not-uncommon swindle. Not only might you not notice the swap in the press of the crowd, but also, again, the crowd might well not notice you. Only on the road home would you worry that someone might see you and put you in a nursery rhyme.

Mother Goose in an 1899 frontispiece (Wikimedia Commons)

Apart from all that, the poem is simply fun to recite. In the version offered here, the iambic tetrameter of the first two lines shifts as the speaker begins to list wives, sacks, cats, and kits. The lines remain tetrameter, but in the next three there’s the emphatic repetition of “each” as the first stressed syllable in a spondee, followed by two iambs. And then there’s that rhythmically odd penultimate line, hammering home three stressed syllables in a row before the final iamb, “and wives.” The whole metrical construction snowballs to its culmination: a puzzle whose solution is buried in women, tote bags, and a cloud of cat dander, on the road from one of two towns. 

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