| "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" Roud #19236 |
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| Written by | Traditional |
|---|---|
| Published | 1852 |
| Written | USA |
| Language | English |
| Form | Nursery rhyme |
"Row, Row, Row Your Boat" is an English language nursery rhyme, and a popular children's song, often sung as a round. It can also be an 'action' nursery rhyme where singers sit opposite one another and 'row' forwards and backwards with joined hands. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19236.
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The most common modern version is:
It has been suggested that the song may have originally arisen out of American minstrelsy.[1] The earliest printing of the song is from 1852, when the lyrics were published with similar lyrics to those used today, but with a very different tune.[1] It was reprinted again two years later with the same lyrics and another tune. The modern tune was first recorded with the lyrics in 1881, mentioning Eliphalet Oram Lyte in The Franklin Square Song Collection but not making it clear whether he was the composer or adapter.[1]
The lyrics have often been used as a metaphor for life's difficult choices, and many see the boat as referring to one's self or a group with which one identifies.[2] Rowing is a skillful, if tedious, practice that takes perfection but also directs the vessel.[3] When sung as a group, the act of rowing becomes a unifier, as oars should be in sync for the progression of a rowboat. The idea that human beings travel along a certain stream [time] and suggests boundaries in the path of choices and in free will.[4] The third line recommends that challenges should be greeted in stride while open to joy with a smile.[5] Some have questioned the song's implied necessity to row one's boat downstream. This may in fact be a commentary on the paradoxical nature of time's arrow with respect to man's free will in a universe of materialistic causality.[6]
The final line, "life is but a dream", is perhaps the most meaningful. With a religious point of view, life and the physical plane may be regarded as having equivalent value as that of a dream, such that troubles are seen in the context of a lesser reality once one has awakened.[7] Conversely, the line can just as equally convey nihilist sentiments on the meaninglessness of man's actions. Philosopher George Berkeley said it: a life is just a dream, one of God's many. With or without God, "life is just a dream" expresses the idealistic side of the non-decidable mind-body problem, of which the materialistic side, the "American" sense of reality, is the other: the naive view that the brain through the senses perceives reality "as it is".
Lewis Carroll, in his famous poem ending Through the Looking Glass used a variation of Row, Row, Row, Row Your Boat as the poem's central theme:
Sometimes people sing additional verses, which should probably be considered a form of Children's street culture, sometimes with the intent simply of extending the song, or sometimes (especially in the case of more irreverent versions) with the intent of making it funny, parodying it, or substituting another sensibility for the perceived innocent one of the original.[8] Versions include:
The song has been used extensively in popular culture, often to reflect existential questions about reality. It was sung by Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock at the beginning and end of the film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), reflecting issues about the need for self discovery.[11] In the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), the song is used on the soundtrack and by Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) as they try to hide from the memory erasers, reflecting issues of the importance of memory to reality.[12] In Fringe (TV series) the character Walter, whilst in a mental institute, remarks that he sometimes hears someone whistling the song but is not sure if it is in fact himself whistling. [13] and later in the same episode refers to his time in a the hospital as like being asleep. In the T.U.F.F. Puppy episode "Cruisin' for a Blusin'", Keswick has many attempts to sing this song only to fail (much to Snaptrap's dismay at the end). [14]