"Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea"

Thus begins Ezra Pound's "Portrait D'une Femme."

Like the lady's, my mind, too, collects oddments in its own Sargasso Sea. Yesterday's poem took me back to childhood and its lullabys, its bedtime stories, its nursery rhymes.

One of the first poems that I learned, or recall learning, was a startling riddle:

I have a little sister, they call her peep, peep,
She wades the waters deep, deep,
She climbs the mountains high, high,
Poor little creature she has but one eye.

Those lines lie floating like Gulfweed on the Sargasso Sea of my mind, caught up in an eddy from the past that has slowly swirled around and returned. There lies the poem before me now.

Yet, it lies. It truly lies. Something is missing.

According to James Orchard Halliwell Phillipps (aka James Orchard Halliwell), who seems to have been somewhat of a Sargasso Sea himself, the correct poem, which he reproduces under Roman numeral "CLI" in the "Seventh Class" of his Grimm-like Nursery Rhymes of England, Collected chiefly from Oral Tradition (London: John Russell Smith, 1846), reads as follows:

I have a little sister, they call her peep, peep,
She wades the waters deep, deep, deep,
She climbs the mountains high, high, high,
Poor little creature she has but one eye.

Since Halliwell was the first to have collected these 'nursery' rhymes from the oral tradition and put them into print, then I must have dropped one "deep" and one "high" from what I had heard recited during my childhood, perhaps following the pattern of "peep, peep."

Or am I indebted to Halliwell at all? Oral traditions have variants, after all. Moreover, did I even learn this rhyme from a book? I grew up in the Ozarks, and much of my family had arrived there in the 19th century from the Appalachians, where they had been living since before the Revolutionary War.

Possibly, I learned my version from oral tradition.

Yet, I seem to recall a book, too. Perhaps my Sargasso sea will return it to me one day, and I can see what lies there . . . in the waters, on the mountains.