Dappled Sunday
Dappled Connemara pony
It was
beautiful in the woods this morning, with the sun slanting through the trees,
casting dappled light on the peaty ground.
The first
lines of a verse came into my mind:
I had a little
pony,
His name was Dapple Grey.
I
couldn’t remember the rest of it, so looked it up when I reached home. Somehow,
I wish I hadn’t!
This is
the traditional English nursery rhyme:
I had a little pony,
His name was Dapple Grey;
I lent him to a lady
To ride a mile away.
She whipped him, she slashed him,
She rode him through the mire;
I would not lend my pony now,
For all the lady’s hire.
It
probably dates back to the 1800s. Iona and Peter Opie, in ‘The Oxford
Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes’ suggest that it originated about 1825.
I
discovered another version, which was popular in USA:
I had a little horse, his name was Dapple Grey,
His legs were made of cornstalks, his body made of hay.
I saddled him and bridled him and rode him off to town,
Up came a puff of wind, and blew him up and down.
The saddle flew off, and I let go -
Now didn’t my horse make a pretty little show?
