I Saw Esau

In 1947 Iona and Peter Opie published their first collection of children's rhymes and named the whole book after this four-line twister. "I Saw Esau, Traditional Rhymes of Youth" came out in London and gathered the property of the playground: nonsense, riddles, insults, comebacks, jeers and tongue twisters. Of everything in it, the Opies put this rhyme on the cover, and the choice tells you what they were after. It is a piece of schoolyard mischief that doubles as a small machine for tripping the tongue.

The joke runs on one accident of pronunciation. "Esau" is said EE-saw, which drops it into the same handful of sounds as "I saw", "he saw" and "she saw". String those together across four lines and the mouth loses track of who is doing the seeing.

Origins

The rhyme circulated among children in the nineteenth century and reached print through collectors rather than authors. Nobody wrote it the way somebody writes a poem. Like most playground verse it travelled mouth to mouth, shifting a little with every mouth, until an adult with a notebook finally wrote a version down.

The Opies were that notebook. Peter Opie (1918 to 1982) and Iona Opie (1923 to 2017) were a married pair of English folklorists who treated children's rhymes as material deserving the same rigour as any literature. Their method was to trace each rhyme to its earliest known printing, record how the wording drifted, and note parallels in other languages. "I Saw Esau" was the opening move. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes followed in 1951, and The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren in 1959, the latter built on a national survey of British children aged roughly six to fourteen who reported their own games, chants, jokes and superstitions.

In 1992 the book came back. Peter had died ten years earlier, so Iona revised the collection alone and added a new introduction, and Maurice Sendak illustrated it under the new title "I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild's Pocket Book". That edition runs to more than 170 rhymes. The Opies' own library, some 20,000 items of children's books and ephemera, was bought for the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford after a public appeal.

Meaning & Interpretation

There is no buried history here. The rhyme is gossip: the speaker catches Esau kissing Kate, Esau catches the speaker watching, and Kate catches the whole chain of watching. Three children, three sightlines, one small scandal. Everybody caught looking at everybody is exactly the sort of thing children find funny about each other, which is why this one lived on playgrounds rather than in nurseries.

The name is borrowed from Genesis, where Esau is the elder of Isaac's twin sons and sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a bowl of stew. The rhyme takes nothing from that story except the sound of the name. It is not religious, and Kate has no biblical counterpart. Esau is in the rhyme because "Esau" sounds like "I saw", and for no other reason.

Who were the Opies?

Iona and Peter Opie were English folklorists, married collaborators, who spent decades documenting the rhymes, games, jokes and beliefs of ordinary children. Their best known books are The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951), which set the standard scholarly account of where these verses come from, and The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), which recorded what children were actually saying to each other in playgrounds at the time. "I Saw Esau" (1947) was their first rhyme collection, and its title rhyme is the one on this page.

Why is it hard to say?

Because "Esau", "I saw", "he saw" and "she saw" are near-identical strings of sound, and the rhyme deliberately alternates between them. The mouth has to reset between almost-matching shapes at speed. Worse, the meaning keeps swapping around (who saw whom, and who saw the seeing), so a reciter cannot coast on rhythm the way you can with a nonsense twister. Slowing down fixes it completely, which is precisely why nobody ever says it slowly.

Is there another version?

Yes. A separate twister built on the same name has Esau sawing wood while the speaker watches ("I saw Esau sawing wood, and Esau saw I saw him"), trading the kissing for carpentry but keeping the same pile-up of see and saw sounds. Playground rhymes rarely have one fixed text. Recording that variation, rather than correcting it, was the whole point of the Opies' work.