TWINKLE, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are;
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are.
This famous rhyme is actually a shorter version of a poem called ‘The Star’, written in 1806 by Jane Taylor (1783-1824). Only twenty-three years old when she composed it, Taylor wrote many collections with her sister Mary, notably Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804) and Hymns for Infant Minds (1808).
However, the well-known melody accompanying the words is French in origin, based on a song called ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman’ (‘Ah! Let me tell you, Mama’) and first published in 1761. The message of the song is somewhat different to ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’. For those of us who cannot speak French, it can be roughly translated as:
Ah! Let me tell you, Mama,
What causes my torment.
Papa wants me to reason
Like a grown-up; But me,
I say that sweets have
Greater value than reason.
It is often claimed that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) composed the tune, but he was only six years old in 1761 when the French folksong was first published. It’s much more likely that he borrowed the folk tune as a motif for the piano variations that he wrote as a seventeen-year-old. As the third famous rhyme to have come from Colchester (see Humpty Dumpty and Old King Cole), a plaque is now fixed to the wall of the Taylors’ house in the old Dutch quarter of the city in honour of the author of the English poem.
The original version of ‘The Star’ had five verses of four lines each:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are;
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky.
When the blazing sun is gone,
When he no longer shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Then the traveller in the dark
Thanks you for your tiny spark;
He could not see the way to go
If you did not twinkle so.
In the dark blue sky you keep
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye
Till the sun is in the sky.
As your bright and tiny spark
Lights the traveller in the dark,
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
Personally, I’ve always preferred Lewis Carroll’s nonsense parody of this, sung by the Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865):
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat,
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea-tray in the sky.