Today’s Poem: Over the River and Through the Wood

The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day

Christian David Gebauer, Winter Landscape with Brabrand Church, 1831 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day

by Lydia Maria Child

Over the river and through the wood,
to Grandfather’s house we go;
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow.

Over the river and through the wood,
to Grandfather’s house away!
We would not stop for doll or top,
for ’tis Thanksgiving Day.

Over the river and through the wood —
oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes and bites the nose,
as over the ground we go.

Over the river and through the wood,
with a clear blue winter sky.
The dogs do bark and the children hark,
as we go jingling by.

Over the river and through the wood,
to have a first-rate play.
Hear the bells ring, “Ting-a-ling ding!”
Hurray for Thanksgiving Day!

Over the river and through the wood—
no matter for winds that blow;
or if we get the sleigh upset
into a bank of snow.

Over the river and through the wood,
to see little John and Ann.
We will kiss them all, and play snowball
and stay as long as we can.

Over the river and through the wood,
trot fast my dapple gray!
Spring over the ground like a hunting-hound!
For ’tis Thanksgiving Day.

Over the river and through the wood
and straight through the barnyard gate.
We seem to go extremely slow —
it is so hard to wait!

Over the river and through the wood —
Old Jowler hears our bells;
he shakes his paw with a loud bow-wow,
and thus the news he tells.

Over the river and through the wood —
when Grandmother sees us come,
she will say, “Oh, dear, the children are here,
bring pie for everyone.”

Over the river and through the wood —
now Grandmother’s cap I spy!
Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!
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New England in the 19th century was home to some of the busybodiest of all the busybodies the world has ever known, and Boston’s Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) must surely rank among their exemplars. On she marched through life: a writer, speaker, and professional complainer — never happy unless she had an evil to fight, a downtrodden population to exhort to greater effort, and a straw man to set on rhetorical fire.

The fact that she was often right in her causes — especially abolition — seems almost incidental: a byproduct of her utter conviction of her own correctness, her do-gooderism, and her Puritan inheritance as one of the elect, the most righteous people in the world. Her railings against the entire discipline of theology, for example, are almost too good to be missed. Almost.

Lydia Maria Child, c. 1865 (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1824, while living in Watertown with her brother (a Unitarian minister and member of the Transcendental Club), Child published her first novel, Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times, said to be the first New England historical novel. In 1826, she founded the Juvenile Miscellany, a national monthly magazine for children. Her most successful book was her 1829 The Frugal Housewife, but the most emblematic may be her 1828 The Mothers Book, giving confident advice on bringing up children, though she had none and wrote the text during the first few months of her marriage.

But Child also composed — and allow her the credit she deserves — the best-known Thanksgiving verses in the canon of popular American poetry: “Over the river and through the wood, / To grandfather’s house we go,” originally titled “The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day.” It was published in 1844, in a volume of her Flowers for Children series, collections of poetry and prose in which she mixed new work with selections from the eight-year run of the Juvenile Miscellany magazine.

These Thanksgving verses were written in ballad meter. That’s a name we use, here at Poems Ancient and Modern, for alternating lines of four and three feet that rhyme only on the shorter lines, abcb. [We reserve “common meter” for poems that alternate lines of four and three feet while rhyming both the long and short lines, abab, as in such poems we’ve run as Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” and Elinor Wylie’s “A Crowded Trolley Car.”]

Child uses the loose anapestic feet (weak-weak-STRONG) often found in light ballad meter, like the trotting of a horse pulling a sleigh. Song-like, the poem repeats a refrain at the beginning of each verse, and Child adds an internal rhyme on feet two and four in the third line: “The dògs do BÀRK and the chìl-dren HÀRK.” See, for example, Robert Service’s comic “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” which, highly competent light verse, uses that internal rhyme in both the first and the third line of the ballad meter:

There are strànge things DÒNE in the mìd-night SÙN
By the mèn who mòil for GÒLD;
The Àrc-tic TRÀILS have their sè-cret TÀLES
That would màke your blòod run CÒLD;

Child’s Thanksgiving poem recounts a sleigh ride to the home of the author’s grandparents (said to be the Paul Curtis house near Medford). It has a few weaknesses: an odd stress to make a rhyme in “We will kiss them all, and play snow-bàll” and an unintended irony in forcing a rhyme with the grandmother’s “Oh, dear, the children are here.” But all in all, it’s reasonable verse.

Set to a melody from an unknown source shortly after its 1844 appearance, the lyrics quickly became a standard American song (usually shortened to four stanzas, with “grandfather” almost always changed to “grandmother” and “wood” to “woods,” and sometimes strangely converted to a Christmas setting). Here, for example, is a 2019 Thanksgiving rendition by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Lydia Maria Child may have been a hectoring busybody, but why not give at least one cheer for “Over the River and Through the Wood,” her inexplicably charming lapse?

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