Hey Diddle Diddle had to have been written by a man who had just been dumped by a girlfriend or had a wife who left him. Let's analyze the opening lines.

In this sentence, the Cat resembles his wife/girlfriend. This is obvious because of the feline is often used as a reference to women. What the man is basically saying is that his wife/girlfriend played him like a fiddle and strung him out until she became bored with him... as cats usually will with strings.

The cow jumping over the moon is a symbol of everything falling apart in his life, his world shattering. The phrase is actually quite similar to pigs flying - pigs can't fly, as cows can't jump over the moon. The unexpected had happened when it seemed that they were doing so good. With the cow now having jumped over the moon, his life was in shambles with her gone.

This pertains to the next and final line of the rhyme. Amidst all of the turmoil he currently had to trudge through, he was laughing at his wife/girlfriend for leaving him. She left him for another man and he apparently knew who it was. This is revealed in the next line:

The last symbol in this rhyme is his wife being the dish. Many people thought that the dog had been laughing at the cow, when in reality he was laughing at his wife/girlfriend and the "spoon". With the new man being the "spoon", this obviously makes the man who wrote the rhyme to be a fork. The fork and the dish had been together, had some good times but ended up scraping together. She was bored and tired of his four impressive, yet small, prongs, and ran to the spoon, knowing that he knew how to really "dig her out". The fork, also known as the dog, was laughing because whereas he is very sharp and on point, he knew the spoon to be a very dull person and would soon send her back to his door... only to find it locked.

Now this rhyme is just a look at life through the eyes of a pessimistic and incredibly stupid failure. When you really pull it apart and point the magnifying glass on it, the spider resembles the author.

Now this is an obvious reference to life being an uphill climb. The man is a spider, the most gentle of insects, simply trying his best to reach the perfect life at the end of the spout. He had been at it for a while until the unexpected irony of nature settles in:

The rain resembles some terrible tragedies that must've happened on his way to the good life. This was somewhat expected, climbing up a waterspout and all, but still devastating to the spider being so small and powerless to stop the rain. He quickly finds some adequate shelter to protect himself from the downpour, but he is still in very bad condition as he was just pummeled down by the rain.

Eventually the spider sees an opportunity to climb the spout again and make it back to the good life. Maybe what had brought him down were police or some kind of law officials, and when the sun shines it's a symbol of their search being discontinued. Whatever the case, he sees that all the problems that were around before have now disappeared.

Knowing that at any time he could be drowned in rainwater, he still takes the risk of going up the waterspout. Eventually, the pattern will repeat and before reaching his goal, rain will fall and knock him to the bottom of the spout. It seems unfair that as a creature so small that has not hurt anything, Mother Nature keeps smacking him down in sorrow. Even with this in mind, he stupidly returns to be pained again. Another stupid mistake that the man made was writing a nursery rhyme about his life and not claiming copyrights or even keeping his name onto the rhyme. He could've made millions of dollars had the poem not been kept "Anonymous."

This rhyme tells a very heart-warming message when thoroughly analyzed. It tells a story of racial prejudice in the days of the old South, when Blacks and Whites had been segregated from each other.

Mary was a black girl who lived in the extremely racist South. She had a very close friend, the lamb, who was a white girl from the next town over. They spent endless amounts of time together, probably playing marbles or what have you, and seemed to be such a perfect pair and almost unable to be separated. Everywhere that Mary went, the white girl was sure to follow.

When the whole South was segregated, that meant Blacks went to their own schools and Whites went to their schools. A white girl showing up at a black school was unheard of and most definitely against the rules.

When the mindset is that Blacks don't share schools with Whites, the idea of a white girl amidst the black children is pretty funny in a strange way. What you have to think of is how ashamed the lamb must've been to be laughed at by the rest of the children, when all she wants to do is just play with Mary. It somewhat says that as much as the children were laughing with her, it still felt terrible.

Then again, how the white girl is referred to as a lamb, too low to even be human but an animal, this rhyme might encourage segregation and how diversifying the people will just cause humiliation. It might be hilarious to the author, the idea of a diverse society, and the view might be to keep the blacks with the blacks and lambs with the other lambs... in their pen.

Whereas Bob Dylan had the Tambourine Man, the "Black Sheep" is a reference to a neighborhood drug dealer. The proof is clearly in the words.

First of all, the dealer is referred to a Black Sheep. The Black Sheep of a family is usually the one nobody likes to talk about and feel embarrassed to be related with, as the Black Sheep in our story would most likely be an outcast by his family. Another thing that might make him a Black Sheep is that he is a black slave. "Sheep" had five letters and so does "slave", and both words begin with "S". Black Slave might be the drug dealer out of disguise, but the rhyme is calling him the Black Sheep to hide the meaning. A man is asking the Black Sheep if he has any wool. Wool is a codename for marijuana, being that "weed" and "wool" both have four letters and begin with "W".

This is simply Black Sheep saying that he does have some marijuana, but it's already sold and tied up. All he has are three bags: one for his slave master to avoid getting another beating, the other for his wife to ease the pain of child birth with no anesthetic, and the other is for a boy who must pay top dollar down the street. Personally, I think corrupting little kids like that is wrong, but when you think about it they didn't see that as a problem back in the slavery days. Kids might smoke from their father's pipe once they get old enough or if they had irresponsible parents. No one knew of cancer or emphysema, so smoking seemed to just be a pastime. The boy must've been paying a lot of money to corrupt the Black Sheep's morals, and also to pass up a customer appearing out of nowhere. Eventually, I would guess that Black Sheep made enough money by the time slavery was over to provide for his family or at least himself. When the slavery was over, he kept a few seeds and moved on to start up shop somewhere else far away from the master and the little boy down the lane.

This one is trickier button to press, but can be done with a keen eye and an open mind. The entire rhyme is about how religion is a scary and frightful thing.

A mouse, the author or even better mankind, is lost in its ways about the house that is life and spirituality. Seeking for an answer to life and the meaning of its existence, he seeks shelter inside of a grandfather clock, which resembles the church. The mouse runs to the church for the answers, holding hopes of a higher power controlling his life and assuring his passage to a paradise afterlife.

The mouse, once inside of the clock, is frightened by the bells of the grandfather clock. To a small mouse, the bells are upsetting to his fragile body. What this symbolizes is church bells and preaching down onto the masses being too much for society to take. It was an attack against the false righteousness that the church carried and the evils they preached when probably practiced. The rules and burdens breaking the back of the mouse struggling to find shelter realizes that a life mystified in life's meaning is better than one spent with religion. Sometimes no direction is the right direction.

This one is pretty vulgar. I can't remember the whole rhyme word for word but I can pretty well tell the meaning.

Peter being a pumpkin eater means that he loved to... you know... eat "pumpkin". If you don't understand it, you don't disserve to have it explained to you. Peter's wife was fixing to leave him. Why else couldn't he keep her? She must've been aching to leave but he didn't have the mind to allow that to happen. Being very traumatized by past rejections and abandonments, he couldn't allow it.

Him keeping her in a pumpkin shell resembles that he kept her prisoner inside of his home by beating her, showing who was the boss and that she could never leave. She was up against the wall and trapped by the jail that was her marriage. The whole "safe and well" part I think is a cover-up to small children who heard the story. I think maybe the original wording was "And there he kept her in a living hell" or something along the lines of that. A man who was too scared that he might never get another woman as good in bed battered his wife and kept her locked away inside the house. It's a shame, really. It really is a horrific depiction of spousal abuse.

This one was a bit of a hassle to figure out but I think I nailed it. At first I believed that the Three Blind Mice were the branches of the government blindly searching for a scapegoat for some kind of incident and immediately attacking the farmer's wife. With further research into the subject, I now believe the answers can be found inside of one classic book - The Crucible.

The Three Blind Mice represent the deciding factors in the Salem Witch Trials: Reverend John Hale, Judge Hathorne, and Deputy Governor Danforth. They ran around blind in the eighteen hundreds, searching for witches that did not exist but blinded to see the truth.

Now this could've been any one of the women who died in the Salem trials, but I think the standout item would have to be John Proctor's wife, Elizabeth. I haven't read the play for a few years, but I think I remember Elizabeth being tried for witchcraft but having her hanging postponed because she was pregnant. I think it might've been cancelled altogether. Eventually they came after Elizabeth, believing her to be a witch.

She cutting off their tails might signal how she avoided her execution. She had somewhat beat the system of their persecution. "Have you ever seen such a sight in your life?" I don't think anybody got out of punishment for being a witch, even if they did sign a confession. Her being let go because of a pregnancy might've been the only loophole anybody had but nobody had used until then. But then again, the last line finishes the question to be "Have you ever seen such a sight in your life as Three Blind Mice?" Maybe it's calling attention to the stupidity of the Salem Witch Trials and the senseless murder that accompanied it. I could be wrong, though, but it's not very likely.