“HEY, DIDDLE, DIDDLE”

“Hey, diddle, diddle…the cat and the fiddle…and the cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed to see such sport...and the dish ran away with the spoon.”

That Mother Goose rhyme inspired this wall mural that I painted a few years back. While painting it I couldn’t get that silly rhyme out of my head. What did it mean? Where had it come from & who was the imaginative person who wrote it?

I decided to do a little research on the web and the one that seemed to be most plausible came from Wikipedia: “It is likely that this poem is a satire of a scandal during the time of Queen Elizabeth I. The cat is Elizabeth and the dog is Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whom she once referred to as her ‘lap dog’. It is also speculated that the ‘dish’ is a server at the royal court, whereas the ‘spoon’ referred to the taste-tester.”

Interesting stuff...except where does the cow come in and why is it jumping over a moon? I guess I’ll go to my grave pondering these earth-shaking questions. I did, however, find a version of this poem that my animal-loving friends will relate to, so I will close with that: “Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat did a piddle...all over the kitchen floor. The little dog laughed to see such a mess...so the cat did a little bit more.”