Green Grow the Rushes, O

Green Grow the Rushes, O (alternatively Ho or Oh) (also known as The Twelve Prophets, The Carol of the Twelve Numbers, The Teaching Song, The Dilly Song, or The Ten Commandments), is an English folk song (Roud #133) popular across the English-speaking world. It is sometimes sung as a Christmas carol.

The song is not to be confused with Robert Burns' similarly titled nor with the Altan song of the same name. It is cumulative in structure, with each verse built up from the previous one by appending a new stanza. The first verse is:

The song occurs in many variants, collected by musicologists including Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp from the West of England at the start of the twentieth century. The stanzas are clearly much corrupted and often obscure, but the references are generally agreed to be both biblical and astronomical.

The twelfth, cumulated, verse runs:

The lyrics of the song are in many places extremely obscure, and present an unusual mixture of Christian catechesis, astronomical mnemonics, and what may be pagan cosmology. The musicologist Cecil Sharp, influential in the folklore revival in England, noted in his 1916 One Hundred English Folksongs that the words are "so corrupt, indeed, that in some cases we can do little more than guess at their original meaning".

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