A tiny, tart couplet about the trouble that starts on a wedding day. It began life as a sewing rhyme, chanted along with needlework, and its brevity makes it easy for very small children to pick up whole.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Needles and pins, needles and pins,
When a man marries his trouble begins.
About this rhyme
First recorded by James Orchard Halliwell in The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842), filed among proverbs, not children's rhymes. · Only later did it move into skipping-game and nursery-rhyme use, as the draft states.
This started life as a saying for grown-ups: the folklorist James Halliwell recorded it as a proverb in 1842, long before it became something to skip rope to. The joke is a pun, needles and pins prick, and so, it says, does marriage. Give it the brisk, singsong rhythm of a skipping rhyme rather than a lullaby.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition