“Little Alice, sweet and pure” nursery rhyme

“Little Alice, sweet and pure” nursery rhyme is a four-line verse that closes the novel’s narrative by turning the language of pilgrimage cures into a dark joke about death. Its lilting rhymes present Alice as a remedy for visitors’ ailments, then make her sweetness ominous in the final line.

Text and Form

The verse is labeled “New Nursery Rhyme” and arranged in paired rhymes: “pure” with “cure,” then “head” with “dead.” Its nursery-rhyme simplicity gives the claims an inviting, almost promotional sound. The final rhyme abruptly changes their force: the promise to clear a visitor’s head gives way to the prospect of smiling at that visitor after death.

Placement and Effect

The rhyme follows the closing scene in which Gerry Fenn, after dwelling on the unexplained glow at the shrine and the white-gowned woman Ben remembered beside the tree, joins Sue and Ben as they enter the church of Our Lady of the Assumption. Against that movement toward companionship and Fenn’s uncertain, newly felt sense of faith, the verse restores the story’s grotesque uncertainty. It recasts Alice’s reputed healing power as a refrain fit for public circulation, while making the language of cure inseparable from the death that shadows the pilgrimage.