Strange fits of passion I have known,

And I will dare to tell

But in the lover’s ear alone

What once to me befell.

But the process by which he winkles it out and drops it into the ear of his chosen one is shrouded in mystery. Proposing is one of the world’s greatest secrets, like sex. Everyone knows that everyone else does it, but they never know exactly how and when. This is why, since you can’t be doing it yourself all the time, there’s a constant fascination with reading and talking about it.

The age-old interest in How To Do It comes out very clearly in all the old folk songs and ballads. For centuries these were the communal repository of wisdom and experience, before people were provided with soap opera as a guide to all human affairs. So there are countless songs in which ‘a froggie would a-wooing go’. Sagas of frog courtship are not only confined to the pottier and more isolated areas of this sceptered isle. Cecil J. Sharp collected literally hundreds of these reptilian romances from all over the USA, froggies and toads a-wooing away like crazy.

A particularly fertile region was the Southern Appalachians, where one redoubtable matron gave Sharp no less than thiry-nine separate tunes. This lady was one Olive Dame Campbell by name, thus giving rise to the speculation that ‘Dame’ was not a handle but a title, awarded for her services to frog music. Admittedly, some of Dame Campbell’s numbers are a bit samey. The basic tale of the amorous amphibian popping the question is cunningly recycled with different hilarious refrains, as here:

Gentleman Frog, he lived in the well, Hi ay de ling kum a laddy,

A lady Mouse, she lived in the mill, Riddle I day, didn’t I daddy.

That one was recorded in Madison County, Kentucky, around the turn of this century. Another Kentucky frog song, from Claiborne County of the same period, has the even more compulsive refrain, ‘Chow Willie, chow wee, chow willie wee, Rig turn a riddle lum a ree, chow willie wee‘ (makes you understand why they invented television, no?) But all these songs, by riddle, by ree, with a fol and a rol or whatever kind of lol, in the end get down to the nitty-gritty:

He took Missie Mouse upon his knee

And he say, `Missie Mouse, will you marry me?’

Which of course, with the invaluable assistance of ol’ Uncle Rat, she does.

Pursuing a suit matrimonial is not the sole prerogative of the cold-blooded species. Folk rhymesters have delighted in trying out this most basic of situations via other creatures as well. In a worn-out book of my childhood is a song that boasts itself as being old when Shakespeare was a little lad, and Mother Goose a slip of a gosling in short frocks:

The happy Courtship, Merry Marriage, and picnic dinner of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren

Robin Redbreast lost his heart, He was a gallant bird,

He doffed his hat to Jenny, And thus to her he said:

My dearest Jenny Wren,

If you will but be mine,

You shall dine on cherry pie And drink nice currant wine.

I’ll dress you like a goldfinch, Or like a peacock gay:

If you will have me, Jenny, Let us appoint the day.

Jenny blushed behind her fan, And thus declared her mind: Then let it be tomorrow, Bob, 1 take your offer kind.

Cherry pie is very good,

And so is currant wine.

But I will wear my russet gown And never dress too fine.

So, with the help of all the birds of the air they are married, and Parson Rook pronounces the blessing:

Happy be the bridegroom,

Happy be the bride,

And may not man, nor bird, nor beast

This happy pair divide.

However many try-outs exist in folk versions, sooner or later folks have got to try it out for themselves — and it’s not that easy. Everyone has to find their own initiation into the mystery, once again just like sex — but with this difference: that there aren’t any proposing manuals or pillow-books to help the bashful and inexperienced male to glide through the mechanics of the act, and raise it to the level of an art. Like marriage itself, as described by the hero of The Provoked Wife, proposing is ‘one great leap in the dark’. And all too many men simply close their eyes and jump!

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