Three Children Sliding on the Ice

This verse can be dated to 1662, which puts it among the oldest English nursery rhymes with a firm printing behind them. Most traditional rhymes cannot be traced past the eighteenth or nineteenth century. This one can, and the place it turns up is strange: the back pages of an English translation of Ovid's De Arte Amandi, the Roman poet's handbook on the art of love.

The story it tells is brief. Three children go out onto ice, the ice gives way, and they drown. That is the entire event, handled in four lines, and the verse shows no interest in dwelling on it. What it wants to get to is the last stanza, where it turns to face the reader and delivers a piece of advice to parents. The advice is nonsense. That is the point.

Origins

The earliest known appearance is a comic metrical tale printed in London in 1662 as a tailpiece to the translated Ovid. It is not a broadside and it is not a ballad, two labels that get attached to it in casual retellings and that suggest the wrong thing about its character. It was a short piece of printed verse sitting at the end of a book of love poetry, in the company that implies.

The lines had a life in performance as well. The Victorian antiquarian James Orchard Halliwell, who did more than anyone to trace English nursery rhymes back to their printed sources, noted that they formed part of an old catch published in the 1714 edition of The Academy of Complements. A catch is a round sung by several voices, usually for amusement and usually not in a church. Halliwell also identified the 1662 Ovid volume as the source, and it is largely through his collections that the verse entered the standard nursery canon in the nineteenth century.

Meaning & Interpretation

Read the first two lines again. Children are sliding on ice on a summer's day, which cannot happen. The verse announces itself as a joke before the plot has even started, and everything after that follows the same arch, deadpan register.

The second stanza offers betting odds. Ten thousand pounds to one penny is the kind of mock precision a person uses when stating something obvious in a comically inflated way, and applying it here is the verse being clever rather than being sad. Then comes the closing address, which is where the satire is clearest. It speaks to all parents who have children and also to those who have none, a category of listener who cannot possibly act on the advice. The advice itself collapses on inspection: if you want your children to be safe when they are out, keep them at home. That is not a warning. It is a parody of one, poking at the sort of adult who dispenses obvious counsel with great solemnity.

This is why the placement matters. Genuinely mournful verse about a child's death belonged in devotional books and funeral elegies, a large and serious category of seventeenth century writing. This piece went to the back of a translation of Ovid instead, because it is a satirical squib and its editors knew it. Cautionary rhymes for children did exist and often did use real consequence to make their point. This one borrows the shape of that tradition and sends it up.

How old is Three Children Sliding on the Ice?

It dates to at least 1662, when it was printed as a comic metrical tale at the end of an English translation of Ovid's De Arte Amandi in London. That makes it one of the oldest English nursery rhymes that can be tied to a specific dated printing, which is the main reason it survives in collections at all.

Why does the rhyme say the children were sliding on a summer's day?

Because ice does not form in summer, and the impossibility is deliberate. The opening pair of lines signals to the listener that the verse is comic before anything happens in it, in the same way that a tall tale starts with a detail nobody is meant to believe.

What does "ten thousand pounds to one penny" mean?

It is a betting expression, quoting absurdly long odds on a certainty. The verse is saying that children who stay at home will obviously not fall through ice, and it says so in the inflated language of a wager to make the obviousness funny.

Is Three Children Sliding on the Ice suitable for young children?

Parents differ, and it is worth knowing what you are getting. The verse ends with three children drowned, stated plainly and without detail. Many modern collections print only the opening stanza, soften the ending, or drop the last verse entirely, so the version in a given picture book may not be the version above. It is taught far less often now than it was in the nineteenth century, and it survives mostly as a historical curiosity rather than as a rhyme children learn by heart.