“Down with the lambs, up with the lark”

“Down with the lambs, up with the lark” is an old nursery rhyme that opens the first chapter, setting its contrasting movement and warning of darkness beside Alice Pagett’s work among the dead. The rhyme’s language of rising and falling acquires an uneasy resonance in a scene where the earth seems to give up its buried inhabitants, while Alice herself cannot hear the words that precede her story.

Form and Placement

The rhyme appears before the chapter’s prose and is attributed simply to an old nursery rhyme. Its short, rhythmic instructions move from lambs going down to a lark rising, then urge children toward bed before nightfall. The text offers no explanation of the verse or claim that Alice recites it; its function here is established by its position as an opening frame.

The Graveyard Scene

The prose immediately shifts to small mounds of dark earth scattered across a graveyard. Alice briefly imagines that the dead are pushing back into the living world, then recognizes the mounds as the work of moles. At eleven, she is there on a weekly chore: while her mother cleans the church, Alice removes withered flowers from the graves and carries them in a red plastic bucket. The rhyme’s approach of darkness thus meets a scene already occupied by burial, decay, and the boundary between life and death.

Silence and Resonance

Alice has been deaf for as long as she can remember. The narration makes that silence concrete when she watches the mole catcher grin and mime, unable to hear him, and when she giggles without hearing her own laughter. Against the rhyme’s audible, sing-song form, her inability to hear creates a sharp contrast; the verse’s movement between down and up also echoes the scene’s uneasy crossing between the graveyard’s dead and the living world Alice imagines. These connections arise from the opening juxtaposition, rather than from any later explanation of the rhyme.