The old mnemonic for remembering how many days each month holds, still doing its job after centuries of use. Not much to dance to, but a genuinely useful one to have by heart.
Spoken. The calendar rhyme most grown-ups still use.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
February has twenty-eight alone,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting leap-year, that's the time
When February's days are twenty-nine.
How it's usually said today
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Except February alone,
Which has but twenty-eight days clear,
And twenty-nine in each leap year.
Traditional rhymes have no single fixed text. The main version on this page is as printed in our source edition; this one is the wording most people say today.
About this rhyme
This is a memory aid rather than a poem, and one of the oldest English verses still in daily use. Forms of it were written down in the sixteenth century, and the job has never changed: it tells you how many days are in each month so you don't have to hold them all in your head. February is the awkward one, at twenty-eight days, or twenty-nine in a leap year, which is exactly why the rhyme spends its last lines on it.
Teach it as a tool. The next time your child asks whether a month has thirty or thirty-one days, say the rhyme and count along to the one you need. It is worth learning by heart early, because it is one of the few nursery rhymes people go on using their whole lives.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition