Certainly in the 1940s and perhaps in later decades, first-graders all over America were taught an "activity" based on a song called "The Farmer in the Dell." Older readers of this blague, if they are courageous enough to delve into long-forgotten and repressed pockets of the past, might dare to summon up the memory.
Here's the game: Ten young waifs, divided equally by gender, formed a circle holding hands around the Chosen One who was designated the "farmer." The gamins (and gamines) sang the following song:
The farmer in the dell,
The farmer in the dell.
Heigh-ho the derry-o,
The farmer in the dell.
While they sang, the "farmer" walked around the inside of the circle and chose a partner from the circle of children. Then the tune was repeated with the key word altered:
The farmer takes a wife,
The farmer takes a wife,
Heigh-ho the derry-o
The farmer takes a wife.
The "wife" then joined him inside the circle, and the plot thickened. Now they sang:
"The wife takes a child,
The wife takes a child;
Heigh-ho the derry-o
The wife takes a child."
And so on down and down the great chain of being.
"The child takes a nurse...
"The nurse takes a cow...
"The cow takes a dog...
"The dog takes a cat...
"The cat takes a mouse..."
And finally, when all the players have been chosen but one, the game ended on the following exclusionary note:
"The cheese stands alone.
The cheese stands alone.
Heigh-ho the derry-o,
The cheese stands alone."
What was the point of this weird game? Why was it included in the "curriculum?" Even seventy years later, it seems to be not fun but gratuitous cruelty. The most popular, the handsomest boy picks the most alluring young lady, and then choices are made in order of status. The game seems to have been devised to reinforce a hierarchical social structure. It was unAmerican, neither democratic or egalitarian. In retrospect, the game was triumphalist with regard to the farmer and his wife and harsh as all get out to the mouse and the cheese. If literary critics were to get their hands on this verse, they would be forced to notice the tragic pattern -- marriage at the outset followed by inevitable decline into isolation and soul-death.
Needless to say, I myself identify not with the prosperous farmer and his vivacious wife, but with the lumpish cheese. Velveeta it probably was, a big shapeless orange block of it, because no fancy aristocratic European cheeses were known to those of us who grew up in the 1940s PS 217 schoolyard. A sad cheese, inanimate, excluded from society, unchosen, least loved. Does the entire history of poetry offer a more mournful note than "the cheese stands alone?" Poor poor pitiful solitary neglected cheese.
In recompense (it's too late for an apology) let us remember, three quarters of a century later, that cheeses have feelings too.
And for the curious, a "dell" is "a small valley in a forest, tucked away from the rest of civilization." At the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenue, where PS 217 was to be found, there were, trust me, no wooded dells. Concrete sidewalks, chain-link fences, yes. Dells no. Delis, but no dells.
Comments