The rhyme that gives the whole collection its name, picturing old Mother Goose flying through the air on a fine gander. Short, strange, and a fitting first taste of the character.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Old Mother Goose, when
She wanted to wander,
Would ride through the air
On a very fine gander.
About this rhyme
The chapbook 'Old Mother Goose and the Golden Egg' (England) dates to about 1815, with illustrated versions into the 1820s. The 1806 date belongs to the Covent Garden pantomime 'Harlequin and Mother Goose, or The Golden Egg', from which the story-poem derives. The chapbook opens with Mother Goose riding a gander and follows her son Jack. 'Early 1800s', as the paragraph puts it, is the defensible framing.
This is the opening of a much longer story-poem, printed as a chapbook in England in the early 1800s, about Mother Goose's adventures on the back of a flying gander and the fortunes of her son Jack. Here it survives as just the picture: an old woman, airborne, riding a goose like it's the most natural thing in the world.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition