As a child I can remember getting together with a group of my school mates, holding hands in a circle and chanting as we skipped:

Ring around the rosy..
pocket full of posies..
ashes..ashes..
we all fall down!


Of course we ended with the releasing of our hands and plummeting as hard as we could to the ground. We never stopped to wonder what the words meant, we didn't care. They enabled us to spin in circles and there was mention of flowers, so it was labeled an innocent game. Something to do when all the other playground toys were taken.

In a history class in college I learned what the words meant, and it made me ill. The professor explained what he stated was fact, but I've since learned is only one explanation of the rhyme: the poem referenced the Black Plague, and that it was created to remind people of the symptoms and used to taunt the victims of the horrible illness.


Defining the Verses

Ring around the rosy..
One of the first symptoms of the plauge was a red rash around a red bump. The rash would have appeared as a ring to the casual observer.

pocket full of posies..
A common belief at the time was that the plague was spread through "foul air" so by putting the flowers in their pockets people could protect themselves from catching the disease. It also served to cover the smell of death and decay. This was used by the healthy as a way to push the reality of what was happening out of their minds, as well as by the already sick to cover the stench that was another symptom of the disease in order to protect themselves from the angry mobs.

ashes..ashes..
One of the final stages of the illness was internal hemoraging. This sometimes triggered sneezing when the breathing passages became irritated. "Ashes" could be a childs view of the sound made when someone sneezes. Another explanation of this verse is that the property of the sick was often burned, as well as the remains of the sick themselves to prevent spreading of the disease. The ashes would then be referring to the burning performed to prevent catching the disease.

we all fall down!
This line becomes obvious once you realize what the poem is about. During the reign of this plague, half of Europe was wiped out. It was rampant and very hard to control due mainly to the squalor people lived in at that time and the fact that they still viewed bathing as a dangerous habit that could cause pneumonia and only did it once a month, if then.


Another Explanation

It has been suggested that perhaps the poem owes its roots to Hinduism and the god Shiva. From what I understand Shiva, known to westerners as the God of Destruction, performed a circular dance that started out slowly then sped up and caused some sages who had strayed from the ways of good to lose consciousness and fall to the ground. Satisfied with his actions the gods in the heavens rained flowers down in approval. This was later duplicated by his devotees as they spun in circles offering up flowers to Shiva and finally falling to the ground due to vertigo. They would perform this ritual over and over again. Their frenzied spinning, falling, rising and spinning some more often stirred up lots of dust and sand. This would then explain the "ashes..ashes.." line of the poem.

Although I believe the Black Plague explanation is the most commonly accepted and known origin of the poem, I can not dismiss the commonalities between the Hindu explanation and the poem. The speeding up during the circular dance and the sense of vertigo are something my school mates and I often experienced while playing the game. This version covers the actions of the children, something I have been unable to locate for the Black Plague explanation. It is possible that they are both responsible for the current form of the poem, as the British were in control of India when the poem was first put into print.


Urban Legend?

The belief that the poem is anything other than a simple rhyme made up by children has been issued by some Urban Legend hunters. The claim is that the poem predated its first printing by several hundred years, so we can not know for sure what it is refering to. An explanation of it being a party game for Protestant children in the nineteenth century has even been hoisted up as further disproof of its darker origins.

The more likely explanation is to be found in the religious ban on dancing among many Protestants in the nineteenth century, in Britain as well as here in North America. Adolescents found a way around the dancing ban with what was called in the United States the "play-party." Play-parties consisted of ring games which differed from square dances only in their name and their lack of musical accompaniment. They were hugely popular, and younger children got into the act, too. Some modern nursery games, particularly those which involve rings of children, derive from these play-party games. "Little Sally Saucer" (or "Sally Waters") is one of them, and "Ring Around the Rosie" seems to be another. The rings referred to in the rhymes are literally the rings formed by the playing children. "Ashes, ashes" probably comes from something like "Husha, husha" (another common variant) which refers to stopping the ring and falling silent. And the falling down refers to the jumble of bodies in that ring when they let go of each other and throw themselves into the circle.

~Folklorist Philip Hiscock

I think that when you consider the Hindu explanation in conjunction with the timing of the rhyme's first printing and Britian's occupation of India, more credit can be given to the plague explanation than the Urban Legend hunters have allowed. There is one thing they have pointed out that is true and can not be disputed. Unless we locate some written evidence that the origin of the rhyme is with the Black Plague events, the Hindu god Shiva, or any other explanation that may be out there, we will never know for sure what the words mean. Is this really a bad thing? We have to decide for ourselves if we want to believe the innocent game we played was a documentation of a horrid time or a religious ferver passed on to the children of India.

References:
Shiva and "Ring Around the Rosy" http://geocities.com/sanskritpuns99/rosy.html
Snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/rosie.htm