Every September 2 offers an opportunity to remember Eugene Field, the American poet, humorist, journalist, and storyteller whose lullabies and poems about childhood became familiar to generations of readers.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850, Field became especially famous for poems such as “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” “Little Boy Blue,” “The Sugar-Plum Tree,” and “The Duel,” also known as the story of the gingham dog and the calico cat. His sentimental poems about childhood eventually earned him the nickname “The Poet of Childhood,” and for decades his verses appeared in school readers, anthologies, nurseries, and family collections across the United States.
Yet that gentle literary reputation captures only one side of Eugene Field.
Before becoming famous for lullabies and nostalgic verse, he had already built a successful career as a newspaper humorist whose columns could be mischievous, sarcastic, irreverent, and occasionally outrageous. He loved elaborate practical jokes, mocked the pretensions of politicians and prosperous citizens, collected rare books obsessively, traveled widely, and turned everyday newspaper work into a distinctive form of personal writing.
Field could write tenderly about a child’s forgotten toys in one piece and gleefully ridicule respectable society in the next.
That contradiction is part of what makes him interesting.
On his birthday, Eugene Field deserves to be remembered not simply as the author of poems once memorized by schoolchildren, but as a writer who helped shape the personality-driven newspaper column while creating some of the most enduring verses about childhood in nineteenth-century American literature.
🎂 Two Birthdays for Eugene Field
Eugene Field was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 2, 1850, although Field himself occasionally made his birthday more complicated.
Later accounts note that he claimed both September 2 and September 3 as birthdays, apparently joking that having two dates increased the chances that his friends would remember at least one of them.
The story is wonderfully characteristic.
Field loved jokes, exaggerations, invented stories, and opportunities to undermine solemnity. Even something as straightforward as his own birthday could become material for humor.
His full name was Eugene Field, and he was born into a family with important connections to American legal history. His father, Roswell Martin Field, was an attorney who became involved in the legal battle surrounding Dred Scott’s attempt to obtain freedom from slavery.
That connection would eventually give the Field family home in St. Louis historical importance extending far beyond Eugene’s literary career.
⚖️ The Field Family and Dred Scott
Eugene’s father, Roswell Field, played an important role in the legal history of the Dred Scott case.
Scott, an enslaved man, pursued freedom through the courts on the argument that he had lived with his enslaver in territories where slavery was prohibited. Roswell Field helped formulate the legal strategy that moved Scott’s case into the federal courts.
The case ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court.
In the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the Court ruled against Scott and declared that people of African descent could not be citizens under the Constitution as the Court interpreted it at the time. The decision intensified the national conflict over slavery during the years preceding the Civil War.
Eugene Field was still a child while these events were unfolding, but his father’s role would later become an important part of the history preserved at the Field family’s St. Louis home.
That building survives today as the Field House Museum.
🌿 Losing His Mother
Field’s childhood changed dramatically when his mother, Frances Reed Field, died in 1856.
Eugene was six years old.
Following her death, Eugene and his younger brother Roswell were sent east to Amherst, Massachusetts, where they were raised by a relative, Mary Field French.
The move removed Field from the Missouri home where he had spent his earliest years and placed him within a very different New England environment.
The loss of his mother at such a young age has often been considered when discussing the strong current of nostalgia running through his later poems about childhood.
Field’s childhood poems frequently look backward.
Children sleep while adults watch them.
Toys remain behind after a child is gone.
Dreams carry children into fantastic landscapes.
Nurseries and bedtime become spaces remembered through the emotions of adulthood.
These poems may appear to be written directly for children, but many of them are equally concerned with how adults remember childhood after it has already disappeared.
That distinction helps explain why Field’s work appealed so strongly to parents as well as young readers.
🎓 An Unconventional Education
Field attended several colleges but never earned a degree.
He enrolled at Williams College in Massachusetts in 1868, later attended Knox College in Illinois, and eventually studied at the University of Missouri.
Academic discipline was not his greatest strength.
Field became better known for his wit, practical jokes, social life, and ability to entertain his classmates than for sustained scholarly achievement.
He left college without graduating.
That lack of academic success did not prevent him from developing broad literary interests. Field read widely, cultivated an intense love of books, and eventually became an enthusiastic collector of rare and unusual volumes.
Formal education may not have suited him particularly well.
Self-directed literary curiosity certainly did.
🌍 Spending His Inheritance in Europe
After the death of his father, Field received an inheritance.
He promptly demonstrated that careful financial planning was not among his defining talents.
Field traveled to Europe and managed to spend a significant portion of his inheritance during a relatively short period abroad.
The episode fits the larger pattern of his personality. He enjoyed experiences, books, conversation, collecting, entertainment, and travel more than financial restraint.
Money would remain a recurring concern throughout his life, despite his eventual success as a journalist.
When he returned to the United States, he needed a profession.
He found one in newspapers.
📰 Discovering Journalism
Field began working in journalism during the 1870s and eventually held positions with newspapers in Missouri, Kansas City, Denver, and Chicago.
The newspaper world suited him exceptionally well.
Late nineteenth-century journalism was often highly personal, competitive, theatrical, and partisan. Newspapers depended upon distinctive voices capable of attracting loyal readers, and Field possessed exactly that kind of personality.
He wrote local observations, humorous pieces, satire, commentary, poems, stories, and sketches.
A newspaper column allowed him to move easily between subjects.
One day he could mock a politician.
Another day he could tell a sentimental story.
Then he might publish a poem.
The format anticipated the kind of personality-driven newspaper writing that would become increasingly important in American journalism.
Field understood that readers were not simply following topics.
They were following him.
💍 Marriage and Family Life
In 1873, Field married Julia Sutherland Comstock.
The couple eventually had eight children, although not all survived to adulthood.
Family life gave Field direct access to the world of children that would become central to his most famous poetry.
His relationship with childhood, however, remained more complicated than the later nickname “Poet of Childhood” might suggest.
Field loved playfulness and possessed a childlike delight in practical jokes, toys, nonsense, and stories. At the same time, accounts from his life describe a man who could tease children mercilessly and whose early humor was often far more sardonic than the gentle poems that made him famous.
Perhaps that contradiction helped him write convincingly about childhood.
Field did not treat children simply as miniature angels.
He understood mischief.
He was extraordinarily good at it himself.
😂 Eugene Field the Practical Joker
Field’s reputation for practical jokes followed him through schoolrooms, newspaper offices, and social gatherings.
He delighted in making up stories, surprising visitors, embarrassing friends, and creating elaborate comic situations.
During his years in Denver, one famous story involved a chair in his newspaper office designed so that an unsuspecting visitor might fall through or collapse toward the floor when attempting to sit down.
Such humor would hardly fit the sentimental image many readers later formed of the author of “Little Boy Blue.”
Yet the prankster and the children’s poet were the same person.
Field’s humor depended upon unpredictability.
He liked upsetting expectations.
The same instinct appears in his newspaper satire, where supposedly respectable people often become ridiculous and social pretensions are punctured without warning.
His public personality became part of his literary reputation.
🏔️ The Denver Years
In 1881, Field moved with his family to Denver and worked for the Denver Tribune.
Denver was still a relatively young Western city, and Field found abundant material in its rapid growth, muddy streets, ambitious residents, colorful language, political disputes, and frontier pretensions.
He worked as an editor while also producing humorous newspaper writing.
His columns frequently satirized local life, sometimes affectionately and sometimes sharply.
Field’s Western years helped establish him as a recognizable newspaper personality beyond Missouri.
They also demonstrated his ability to transform local observations into entertainment that readers elsewhere could appreciate.
A joke about Denver might begin with a particular politician or muddy street, but Field understood the broader weaknesses underneath it: vanity, ambition, greed, self-importance, and the universal human tendency to take oneself too seriously.
🏙️ Moving to Chicago
In 1883, Field accepted an offer to move to Chicago.
The decision would define the remainder of his career.
He began writing for the Chicago Morning News, later associated with the Chicago Daily News, where his column “Sharps and Flats” became enormously popular.
The title itself suggests Field’s mixture of observation, wit, criticism, poetry, and personal commentary.
Chicago in the 1880s was one of America’s fastest-growing cities.
Fortunes were being made.
Industries were expanding.
Immigrants were arriving.
Architecture was changing.
Political machines were powerful.
Cultural institutions were trying to establish the city as something more than an enormous commercial center.
Field found the environment irresistible.
Chicago supplied exactly the mixture of ambition and pretension that satire needs.
🐖 Making Fun of Chicago
Field did not hesitate to mock his adopted city.
He joked about Chicago’s materialism, commercial obsession, cultural insecurity, and determination to prove itself respectable.
For local readers attempting to establish Chicago as a serious cultural capital, being mocked in their morning newspaper could be uncomfortable.
Field’s satire therefore produced both affection and irritation.
He teased the city because he understood it.
Chicago was energetic, ambitious, boastful, and perpetually reinventing itself.
Field shared more than a few of those qualities.
The relationship between writer and city gradually became mutually beneficial.
Chicago gave Field a huge audience.
Field helped give Chicago a literary personality.
✍️ “Sharps and Flats”
Field’s “Sharps and Flats” column became the center of his professional life.
Unlike a narrowly focused modern newspaper column, it could contain almost anything.
Field wrote literary gossip, political satire, jokes, social observations, sketches, poems, invented conversations, and personal reflections.
The column’s variety made Field feel familiar to readers.
They encountered him repeatedly, not simply when he had a new book to sell.
This daily relationship helped create the audience that later embraced his poetry.
Much of Field’s writing first appeared in newspapers before being collected in book form.
That newspaper origin also explains the conversational quality of much of his work.
Field wrote for people reading over breakfast or on the train.
He needed to catch attention quickly.
📚 From Humorist to “Poet of Childhood”
Field’s reputation changed significantly during the late 1880s and early 1890s.
The newspaper humorist increasingly became known for sentimental and imaginative poems concerning children, toys, dreams, bedtime, and family love.
These poems reached readers far beyond Chicago.
They appeared in magazines, newspapers, anthologies, and eventually collections devoted specifically to childhood.
The transition did not mean Field abandoned humor.
Instead, a second literary identity became increasingly important.
The man famous among colleagues for jokes and satire became, to the reading public, the gentle poet of nurseries and bedtime.
Few poems did more to create that reputation than “Little Boy Blue.”
🧸 “Little Boy Blue”
Field published “Little Boy Blue” in 1888.
The poem centers on toys left waiting for a child who will never return to play with them.
Its emotional power comes from understatement.
The toys remain where the child left them.
Time passes.
Dust gathers.
The reader gradually understands why their owner has not returned.
Victorian audiences responded intensely to this kind of sentimental meditation on childhood and loss, particularly in an era when childhood mortality remained painfully familiar to many families.
“Little Boy Blue” quickly became one of Field’s signature works.
During public appearances and readings, audiences frequently requested it.
The poem’s enormous popularity helped permanently associate Field with nostalgic childhood verse.
🌙 “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod”
If “Little Boy Blue” represents Field at his most melancholy, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” displays his gift for dreamlike fantasy.
The poem follows three children sailing through the night sky in a wooden shoe, traveling among stars and dreams before the imaginative journey resolves into a bedtime scene.
Its musical rhythm made it particularly well suited to reading aloud.
Generations of parents encountered the poem as a lullaby, and musical adaptations helped extend its popularity.
The names themselves became culturally familiar.
Wynken.
Blynken.
Nod.
They sound like characters who could only exist in the few moments between wakefulness and sleep.
That ability to give dream logic a memorable rhythm is one reason the poem has survived when much nineteenth-century children’s verse has disappeared.
🍬 “The Sugar-Plum Tree”
Field returned to the world of dreams in “The Sugar-Plum Tree.”
The poem imagines a magical tree whose fruit consists of sweets and treats waiting for adventurous children.
Like “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” it succeeds partly because Field understood the pleasures of abundance and impossibility in children’s imagination.
Ordinary trees produce fruit.
Why shouldn’t a dream tree produce candy?
Field’s childhood poetry often begins with familiar domestic experiences—bedtime, toys, parents, sweets—and then opens a doorway into fantasy.
The dream world is close enough to reality to feel reachable.
Perhaps tonight.
Perhaps after falling asleep.
🐕 “The Duel”
Field’s humorous side appears clearly in “The Duel,” better known to many readers as the poem about the gingham dog and the calico cat.
The poem recounts an apparently ferocious confrontation between two toy animals that ends with both mysteriously disappearing.
It is playful, absurd, and much closer to Field’s newspaper humor than the sorrowful atmosphere of “Little Boy Blue.”
The poem demonstrates why describing Field solely as a sentimental children’s poet can be misleading.
His childhood writing contained nonsense, comedy, fantasy, mischief, and darkness alongside tenderness.
Children’s literature gave him another arena in which to play with language.
📖 With Trumpet and Drum
In 1892, Field published With Trumpet and Drum, one of the collections that solidified his reputation as a writer associated with childhood.
The book brought together poems that emphasized imagination, play, lullabies, childhood experiences, and family affection.
Field’s verse proved particularly suitable for memorization and recitation.
That quality mattered enormously in an era when poetry was routinely taught through school readers and children were often expected to memorize verses.
A poem with a memorable rhythm could travel for decades through classrooms and households even after the original book disappeared from common circulation.
Field benefited enormously from that culture.
His poems became part of childhood itself for many readers.
❤️ Love-Songs of Childhood
Field followed with Love-Songs of Childhood in 1894.
The title reflects the increasingly affectionate public image surrounding his work.
The collection included poetry that would remain among his best known, including pieces associated with bedtime, toys, humor, and parental affection.
The phrase “Poet of Childhood” became closely attached to Field during and after his lifetime.
Yet these poems are often as much about adult memory as children’s experience.
Field’s adults look at children with the knowledge that childhood is temporary.
Children grow.
Families change.
Toys are abandoned.
People disappear.
That awareness gives the poems their undercurrent of melancholy.
🧠 Childhood Remembered by Adults
Modern readers may notice something interesting when returning to Field’s supposedly children’s poetry.
Many of the poems are deeply nostalgic.
Nostalgia requires distance.
Children cannot usually feel nostalgic for the childhood they are still living through.
Adults can.
This suggests that some of Field’s most famous childhood poems are not simply intended to entertain children.
They allow adults to mourn or celebrate the period of childhood from the other side of it.
That perspective may explain why Field’s work retained such emotional force among parents and grandparents.
The child hears the lullaby.
The adult hears time passing.
Both are reading the same poem.
📚 A Passionate Bibliophile
Field’s love of literature extended far beyond writing.
He was an enthusiastic collector of books and developed a particular fascination with unusual, beautiful, rare, and finely printed volumes.
Books themselves mattered to him as physical objects.
Bindings, paper, typography, illustrations, handwriting, and provenance could become part of the pleasure of reading and collecting.
His passion eventually inspired The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, published after his death.
The title captures the intensity of his collecting habit.
A bibliophile enjoys books.
A bibliomaniac has gone considerably further.
Field belonged happily in the second category.
✒️ The Book as an Object
Field sometimes decorated manuscripts and written materials himself, treating the visual presentation of language as part of the pleasure of authorship.
This interest places him within an older tradition of book culture that can seem distant in an age of screens and digital publishing.
For Field, a poem was language, but the page containing that language could also possess beauty.
His collecting instincts connected writing with craftsmanship.
A beautifully made book deserved appreciation not only because of what it said but because of what it was.
That passion has helped preserve a rich physical record of his literary life.
Collections associated with Field today include first editions, manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials documenting his work.
🏛️ Horace on the Sabine Farm
Field’s literary interests were not limited to contemporary American writing.
Together with his brother Roswell, he produced Echoes from the Sabine Farm, a loose and playful engagement with the poetry of the Roman poet Horace.
The project reveals another side of Field.
The supposed children’s poet was deeply interested in classical literature.
The newspaper humorist could move comfortably between ancient poetry and modern Chicago.
That range explains why his work resists simple categorization.
Field was a popular writer, but he was not intellectually narrow.
He drew material from journalism, classics, folklore, children’s traditions, urban life, private jokes, and his enormous reading life.
🏡 Sabine Farm
Field eventually named his Chicago-area home Sabine Farm, another reference to Horace.
The home became closely associated with his later life, his family, and his book collecting.
Domestic life remained a frequent source of material.
At the time of Field’s death, he was working on The House, a partly autobiographical book about the experience of a family establishing itself in a home.
The work appeared posthumously.
The subject again demonstrates Field’s attraction to ordinary domestic experiences.
A house could provide as much literary material as politics or travel.
Perhaps more.
🤝 Eugene Field and Mark Twain
Field moved within the broad literary world of late nineteenth-century America, a period that also produced writers such as Mark Twain.
The comparison is especially interesting because both men understood the literary possibilities of humor.
Neither believed seriousness required solemnity.
A joke could reveal vanity.
Satire could expose hypocrisy.
Absurdity could say something truthful about supposedly respectable institutions.
Their careers were very different, but Field and Twain both helped establish humor as an important part of American literary identity.
Field’s humor has not remained as famous as Twain’s, yet readers who know him only through children’s poetry may be surprised by how sharp his newspaper writing could be.
📰 Journalism as Literature
Field belongs to an era when newspaper writing and literary writing frequently overlapped.
Journalists wrote books.
Novelists wrote columns.
Poems appeared beside political reporting and advertisements.
A popular columnist could become a national celebrity.
Field thrived within that environment.
His literary reputation cannot be separated from journalism because newspapers provided not only his employment but also the laboratory in which he developed his voice.
The daily column rewarded flexibility.
It encouraged observation.
It required constant production.
It demanded a relationship with ordinary readers.
Field learned to turn those demands into a style.
🕯️ Eugene Field’s Final Years
Field’s health deteriorated during the 1890s, but he remained professionally active.
He continued writing his newspaper column, producing poetry, collecting books, and working on literary projects.
His public reputation was considerable.
He had become a familiar figure in American literary and newspaper culture, and his poems about children were increasingly entering the popular imagination.
That career ended suddenly.
Eugene Field died in Chicago on November 4, 1895, from heart failure.
He was only 45 years old.
His death came at an age when many writers are still developing their most important work, making the amount Field produced through journalism, poetry, humor, and prose especially striking.
📚 Books Published After His Death
Field’s literary life did not end immediately with his death.
Several works appeared posthumously, including The House and The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac.
Editors and publishers also continued collecting material originally scattered throughout his newspaper columns.
This was especially important because journalism can be ephemeral.
Yesterday’s newspaper is easily discarded.
A book gives newspaper writing a chance at a second life.
The preservation of Field’s columns and manuscripts helped scholars see a much broader writer than the sentimental children’s poet remembered in popular culture.
🏠 The Field House Museum
The St. Louis house associated with Field’s childhood survived into the twentieth century and eventually became the Field House Museum.
The building is historically important for two distinct reasons.
It preserves the memory of Eugene Field.
It also preserves the story of his father Roswell Field’s role in the legal struggle surrounding Dred and Harriet Scott.
The house was saved from demolition during the 1930s and opened as a museum in 1936.
In 2007, it received designation as a National Historic Landmark.
Today, the museum maintains materials connected with the Field family and Eugene’s literary career, including books, manuscripts, furnishings, and objects associated with his life.
The building therefore links several layers of American history: slavery and the law, nineteenth-century St. Louis, literary culture, children’s poetry, and the preservation of historic places.
📖 The Eugene Field Library
The Field House Museum also maintains a collection devoted specifically to Eugene Field’s literary legacy.
The Eugene Field Library includes editions of his works, manuscripts, signed books, and materials published both during his lifetime and after his death.
For a writer who loved books almost obsessively, a library is an especially fitting memorial.
Field would likely have appreciated the irony as well.
The man who never finished college now has scholars studying his manuscripts.
The practical joker became a museum subject.
The newspaper columnist became history.
🌙 Why “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” Survived
Literary reputations change dramatically.
Some writers who dominated their own era disappear almost completely.
Others survive through one poem, one novel, or even one character.
Eugene Field occupies an interesting position somewhere between those possibilities.
Much of his newspaper writing is now unfamiliar to general readers.
Many of his once-popular poems are rarely encountered.
Yet “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” continues appearing in children’s anthologies, musical settings, illustrations, nursery decorations, and bedtime collections.
Why?
Part of the answer is musicality.
The poem sounds good aloud.
Part is imagery.
Children sailing through a night sky in a wooden shoe is an image simple enough to remember and strange enough to feel magical.
And part is emotional continuity.
Parents still put children to bed.
Children still resist sleep.
Dreams remain mysterious.
The basic situation never became obsolete.
🧸 Why “Little Boy Blue” Still Hurts
“Little Boy Blue” survives for almost the opposite reason.
Where “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” turns bedtime into fantasy, “Little Boy Blue” turns childhood objects into reminders of mortality.
Anyone who has cleaned out a child’s old room understands how ordinary objects can suddenly carry enormous emotional weight.
A forgotten toy is not merely an object.
It becomes evidence of time.
Field understood that connection remarkably well.
His sentimental style may belong unmistakably to the nineteenth century, but the emotional mechanism remains recognizable.
Things survive people.
That is why they become difficult to throw away.
✨ The Poet of Childhood — and More
Calling Eugene Field the “Poet of Childhood” is not wrong.
It is simply incomplete.
He was also a humorist who could be merciless toward pretension.
A journalist who helped popularize the personal newspaper column.
A practical joker who treated daily life as potential comedy.
A bibliophile fascinated by books as objects.
A student of classical literature.
A traveler.
A collector.
And a writer whose imagination could shift from a noisy Chicago newsroom to a wooden shoe sailing among the stars.
Those identities did not compete with one another.
They made the work possible.
The humor kept sentimentality from becoming his entire world.
The sentiment gave emotional depth to the humorist.
The collector fed the writer.
The journalist taught the poet how to reach ordinary readers.
🌎 Why Eugene Field Still Matters
Eugene Field’s literary fame is smaller today than it was during the decades following his death, but his career offers a fascinating picture of American writing during the late nineteenth century.
He lived at a time when newspapers could create national literary figures and poems could become part of everyday family life through memorization, recitation, and school readers.
He also understood something that remains true in every era.
Readers remember voices.
Field’s voice could be tender or ridiculous, nostalgic or satirical, polished or deliberately mischievous.
That flexibility made him successful across genres.
His poems also demonstrate the extraordinary power of writing for apparently small subjects.
A toy.
A bedtime.
A lullaby.
A child’s dream.
None sounds like the material from which literary fame is necessarily made.
Field made it anyway.
🎂 Remembering Eugene Field on His Birthday
Eugene Field was born on September 2, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri, although the famously mischievous writer later enjoyed claiming September 3 as an additional birthday as well.
Perhaps celebrating him across two days would have suited him perfectly.
Field spent his short life turning ordinary experiences into stories, jokes, poems, columns, and memories. He moved from St. Louis to New England, Missouri, Colorado, and Chicago, leaving behind newspaper writing, satire, children’s verse, literary translations, books about collecting, and some of the most recognizable bedtime poetry in American literature.
His reputation changed after his death.
The sharp newspaper humorist gradually faded behind the gentler image of the children’s poet.
But both belonged to Eugene Field.
The writer who imagined Wynken, Blynken, and Nod sailing into the night sky was also the man who delighted in making visitors fall through chairs.
The poet who could make readers cry over a child’s abandoned toys could turn around and mock an entire city.
That mixture of tenderness and mischief deserves to be remembered.
On September 2, Eugene Field’s birthday gives us a reason to rediscover not only the “Poet of Childhood,” but the lively, funny, book-loving journalist behind the familiar poems.
And perhaps the best place to begin is with one of those poems at bedtime, read aloud as it was meant to be.
More than a century later, the wooden shoe is still sailing.
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe–
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked of the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!”
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in that beautiful sea–
“Now cast your nets wherever you wish–
Never afeard are we!”
So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam—
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home;
‘T was all so pretty a sail it seemed
As if it could not be,
And some folks thought ‘t was a dream they ‘d dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea—
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one’s trundle-bed.
So shut your eyes while mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea,
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
-Eugene Field
