"Crosspatch, draw the latch" and Industrial Capitalism

One of the most joyful of nursery rhymes, and a personal favorite, is this:

                               Crosspatch,

                               Draw the latch.

                               Sit by the fire and spin.

                               Take a cup,

                               And drink it up.

                               Then call the neighbors in.

The clicky rhymes and jaunty meter are undeniably beautiful -- and there's much more meaning than poems of this kind usually contain.

In the first triad, a "crosspatch," -- a "cross or ill-tempered person, usually a girl or woman" -- is at work, spinning. In the second triad, she's exhorted to drink and also to invite her neighbors "in" -- presumably into the room, or just as likely, the tiny cottage -- where she lives alone. In the first strophe, the theme is isolation, but in the second, isolation is challenged by the calls of society and by the hope of a more satisfactory and convivial life.   

What can we know or imagine about the surly individual addressed by the evocative designation, "crosspatch?"  The first element in the name --"cross"-- implies not only sourness, but also resistance, as in "cross-grained." The second element -- "patch" -- suggests that the crosspatch's discontent is not without cause. We can infer that she's poor because she's a person whose garments are either assembled from various rescued materials, as in "patchwork," or that her clothes are, in another sense of the word patch, repaired. In addition, it's possible that ill health has caused her skin to become "patchy."  But "patch" also signals a degree of mental stress, as in Shakespeare's "patched fool." In this signification, patch derives from Italian pazzo, crazy. The crosspatch is therefore disabled physically, socially and psychologically.

At the outset of the poem, our "crosspatch" sits glowering, impoverished, perhaps muttering indistinctly, friendless, without family, her youth blighted by poverty, huddled against the last embers of her dying fire. What is it that she is spinning? No doubt she ekes out a meager living in the impersonal mercantilist "putting-out" system. Some exploitative proto-capitalist venturer has delivered to her lonely door a quantity of unspun wool or cotton;  her job is to return the material to him in the processed form that will then be passed on to an equally poor weaver, then to a tailor, etc. She works alone and never sees the fruits of her labor except for the occasional, paltry farthing that allows her a bare subsistence. No wonder she is slightly barmy and has "drawn the latch" -- closed herself off from her fellows. But then, suddenly, comes the antistrophe, and in a series of importunate injunctives the crosspatch is asked to rejoin the company of humanity. "Take a cup,/ And drink it up,/ Then call the neighbors in."  What's in the cup?  Spiritous liquors, no doubt, which, though designed to dull the pain of wage-slavery, also act to augment the revelry with which the poem climaxes. The wine is not sipped, but it is drained to the lees. And once the door is unlatched, and the neighbors -- neighbors of both sexes, no doubt -- are called "in," why then, let the libations and the wild rumpus begin! Alienated labor is suddenly set aside and replaced by the natural bonds of one human being to another, and the stasis of the opening lines of the poem transforms in a flash into a wildly kinetic bacchanal. Emotional weakness transmutes into healthy liberated pleasure. Dour Puritanism, with its punishing work ethic, yields to the spirit of holiday and to pagan, perhaps even dionysian, excess. Here, in miniature, is the essence of the comic vision. In a few powerful lines, freedom, good humor, and natural appetite triumph over bondage, artificiality, social constriction and repression; the justifiably sullen crosspatch, in a burst of energy, reintegrates herself into the social nexus from which she has been banished.

Whether or not the crosspatch can permanently liberate herself from the oppressions of industrial capitalism, or whether the anodyne and spurious relief of alcohol is a merely transient solution is left unresolved. To ask a short poem, however dense with meaning, to answer so difficult a question would, just possibly, be to ask too much of it and, perhaps, to push the evidence the merest tad too far.

Comments

[Kate]

Well, I have a spinning wheel and making yarn is one of my hobbies. The point is that spinning is very meditative - so if you are cross, give yourself some alone time, have a cup of tea, and by the time you are finished your mood will improve and you will be fit company for your neighbours!

[Deborah Meyler]

We used to call each other crosspatches when we were children, taking it from adults, of course. A perfectly nice person could suddenly become a crosspatch, and then would come round again. I don't think that the woman in the rhyme would be permanently cross due to straitened circumstances or the miseries of trickle-down economics. She might be so regularly cross that she deserves the epithet, but I think the exhortation is the one that I heard countless times gowing up - have a cup of tea and feel better, and then, when you are in a better mood due to the tea, ask your friends in and feel better still. I'd bet my hat - although I have no way of knowing - that "take a cup" refers to tea. Spinners wouldn't have been able to spin very well if they had all been Mrs Gamps. My great aunts who all worked in the mills, and my grandmother (and her mother) - they all drank tea as if it was going out of fashion, and spiritous liquor consumption amounted more or less to a little glass of sherry at Christmas.

[Joe]

I have always seen this more as a trajectory of emotion; a reaction to some unknown wrong, real or perceived, that leads our protagonist to loop out of society and sulk, spinning sullenly in her drab parlour, cogitating on events. Eventually, upon resorting to some restorative liquor, the iron fug of mental dolour is lifted, and the loop is completed by a return to sociability.
This

[diane]

As a spinner, there is nothing more calming when grumpy than to make a cup of tea, sit at my spinning wheel and spin. After a bit of time spinning in solitude with that good cup of tea, I am much more amenable to having company!

[John Orford]

The cup certainly doesn't have to be tea - it could equally be wine or punch in the old days. Crosspatch draws the latch, sits and broods over her (somehow it seems to be a poor lonely old lady) troubles, then begins to feel better, brews some punch and calls her neighbours to share it and help her feel brighter.

[gloria]

I fear you have missed the point of the rhyme - it is not advice to 'call the neighbors in' - instead it is an observation of the lonely/selfish behaviour of this solitary person, who draws the latch (locks the door), makes and drinks a cup of tea, and only then invites others to join her - i.e. will not share the drink!