Lyrics and Melody
The rhyme is one of the best known and most popular in the English language. The most common modern text is:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
It is a single quatrain, with external rhymes that follow the pattern of AABB and with a trochaic metre, which is common in nursery rhymes. The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded by the composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs (London, 1870). The Roud Folk Song Index, which catalogues folk songs and their variations by number, classifies the song as 13026.
Read more about this topic: Humpty Dumpty
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