Analysis
Ordinarily one would be ill-advised to attempt to offer a broad statement concerning 1,044 poems. In James Whitcomb Riley’s case, however, his poetic undertakings were so limited in subject, treatment, and style that it is indeed possible to make generalizations about them. Most of his poems fall into one or more of the following categories: pastoralized treatments of life in rural America, sentimentalized renderings of the relationships between family members or friends, and equally sentimentalized evocations of childhood. As illustrations of these three categories, one might consider “When the Frost Is on the Punkin,” “Knee-Deep in June,” “Nothin’ to Say,” “The Old Man and Jim,” “The Raggedy Man,” “Little Orphant Annie,” and “The Old Swimmin’-Hole.”
“When the Frost Is on the Punkin”
In an age when many Americans have never seen frost on a pumpkin—or, for that matter, pumpkin not in a pie—it is rather remarkable that the title of Riley’s “When the Frost Is on the Punkin” is still in circulation, even if the poem itself is largely forgotten. Clearly working within the venerable tradition of the harvest poem (John Keats’s “To Autumn” is a sterling example), Riley has so generalized and so de-emotionalized the potentially rich subject of the country autumn that the poem is strikingly charmless. Predictably, the air is “appetizin’” and the morning is “crisp and sunny”; the obligatory rooster crows his obligatory “hallylooyer”; and the requisite apples are “poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps,” dutifully ready to be made into cider and applesauce. Vague catalogs of stock autumnal delights, however, together with the overdone repetition of “When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,” and the patently sentimental conclusion that any “Angels wantin’ boardin’” would be more than happy to live in the country at harvest-time, simply cannot salvage the poem. To a nation that was still essentially rural—or, more important, which perceived itself as such—the bland catalogs probably struck deep emotional chords, but to modern readers, all that remains of one of Riley’s most famous poems is the fundamentally meaningless title.
“Knee-Deep in June”
Not all Riley’s poems feature the flurry of farm activity depicted in “When the Frost Is on the Punkin.” The other side of Riley’s brand of rural American life—the “mild Bohemianism” and “fatuousness” that Donald Pizer has cited as characteristic of Riley’s verse (American Thought and Writing: The 1890’s, 1972)—are perhaps nowhere more apparent than in “Knee-Deep in June,” originally published in the Indianapolis Journal in 1885. Overlong at eight stanzas, it enjoins one to find an orchard and “Lay out there and try to see/ Jes’ how lazy you kin be!—” Although the persona explains in the first stanza that he engages in this sort of activity (or lack thereof) only on “some afternoon[s],” it is nevertheless apparent that he could do this “stiddy fer a year er two,” if not for eternity; and the overall impression that one receives from “Knee-Deep in June” is that the Puritan work ethic has been rejected wholesale. Quite typical of Riley’s verse are the poem’s vague renderings of the details of a country landscape (“Hear the old hen squawk, and squat/ Over ever’ chick she’s got”), the domestic metaphors (the shadows are “thick and soft/ As the kivvers on the bed/ Mother fixes in the loft/ Allus, when they’s company!”), and the strained attempts at quaint humor (“Mr. Bluejay, full o’ sass,/ In them base-ball clothes o’ his”). Even the reference to death is carefully sentimentalized to contribute to the aura of lassitude:
Thinkin’ of old chums ’at’s dead, Maybe, smilin’ back...
(This entire section contains 2379 words.)
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at youIn betwixt the beautifulClouds o’ gold and white and blue!
In keeping with the theme of the poem, “Knee-Deep in June” is spread out in leisurely fashion over seven pages of the volume Songs of Summer and features three illustrations by Will Vawter, including a full-page picture of a man “Sprawl[ed] out len’thways on the grass.”
“Nothin’ to Say”
The sentimentality so characteristic of “When the Frost Is on the Punkin” and “Knee-Deep in June” is also evident in the Riley poems that focus on interpersonal relationships rather than on farm life as such. “Nothin’ to Say,” which was accepted for publication by the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1883 but which did not appear until August of 1887, was an immensely popular poem in its day. It is a dramatic monologue in which a father speaks to his daughter, who has declared her intention of getting married on her next birthday. The girl’s mother is dead, having left her baby daughter a “little Bible” with “yer name acrost the page” and some earrings; and, as might well be anticipated, the daughter, in looks and size, is much like the mother. To complete the mother/daughter analogy, the father notes that “It’ll ’most seem like you was dead like her!”; but, faced with the inevitability of his child marrying and moving away, the helpless father “hain’t got nothin’ to say!”
“The Old Man and Jim”
A poem equally predictable and sentimental is “The Old Man and Jim,” one of Riley’s most successful platform pieces. The unidentified narrator records the relationship between an old farmer and his favorite son Jim, “the wildest boy he had.” Constitutionally ill-suited to farming, Jim enlists in the Army for three months at the outbreak of the Civil War and his father, who is “jes’ wrapped up in him,” sends him off to the service with the words “’Well, good-by, Jim:/ Take keer of yourse’f!’” Those parting words become the refrain of the poem, as Jim distinguishes himself in battle, reenlists, and dies of his wounds. A woeful tale, “The Old Man and Jim” must have had quite an impact when dramatically recited by Riley.
“The Raggedy Man”
Considerably less depressing is the sentimentalized rendering of the relationship between a hired man and children in “The Raggedy Man,” one of the best known of the poems Riley wrote depicting child life. Published in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in December, 1890, the poem obviously stirred much interest, for Riley felt compelled to explain that “The Raggedy Man was not a tramp, nor was he so ragged as people usually seem to think. He was just a farmer boy from some neighboring family.” Perhaps this was literally so, but the poem is told from the point of view of a child, and as a result that farmer boy emerges as a sort of combination hired man and oversized playmate. In the first two stanzas, the Raggedy Man embodies the world of adult labor that is so alien to the child-persona, and in that respect, he serves to represent the parental figures who are most prominent in any child’s formative years. In the third stanza, the poem begins to slip into the more imaginative aspects of child life, as the Raggedy Man tells how he picked roasted apples from a tree. This playful motif continues in subsequent stanzas, as the child recounts how the Raggedy Man plays “horsey” with him, tells him about giants and elves, pretends to shoot escaped pigs with his hoe (the “Old Bear-shooter”), reveals that the child is actually a prince whose real father has “gone/ To git more money,” and “steals” the child and hides him in a “cave” (actually the haymow).
This heavily folkloric rendering of child life in rural America comes to an abrupt end in the final stanza, wherein the Raggedy Man asks whether the child wishes to become “a rich merchunt” like his father. The child predictably responds “’I’m ist go’ to be a nice Raggedy Man!’”; but however appropriately “cute” that answer may be, the fact remains that there is an undercurrent in “The Raggedy Man” that is at odds with the folksy, childlike atmosphere it superficially creates. There is a world of difference between the hired man in his insistently “raggedy” attire (that adjective appears some forty-seven times in the eighty-three-line poem) and the persona’s father in his “fine clothes”—a difference that is most apparent in the simple fact that the father, although he owns a farm, must hire the Raggedy Man to handle the decidedly nonpastoral, physically demanding chores associated with farm life. In the America that had once proudly proclaimed itself to be a nation of farmer-citizens, there had arisen by Riley’s era a dichotomy between the rural poor and those prosperous urbanites who were quite willing to pastoralize their country roots as long as others would (literally) handle the dirty work. It is difficult to believe that Riley, himself a wealthy urbanite who had enjoyed a comfortable early life, was unaware of the tension generated in the poem by the child’s double emotional allegiance to his wealthy, oddly remote father and to the poor, hardworking, fun-loving hired man whom the father employs, but Riley, true to form, does not develop the social consciousness that glimmers so faintly in “The Raggedy Man,” and the poem remains essentially an evocation of childhood.
“Little Orphant Annie”
An equally well-known rendering of child life is “Little Orphant Annie.” Originally titled “The Elf Child” and published in the Indianapolis Journal in 1885, it proved to be so popular that Riley was able to sell the little poem (four eight-line stanzas) as the lavishly illustrated Orphant Annie Book. Annie (or “Allie,” as she was originally named) was based on a real person, an orphan who had lived briefly with the Riley children (she apparently has nothing in common with the saucer-eyed comic strip heroine of the same name). In Riley’s poem, she was to “earn her board-an’-keep” by doing housework for the persona’s family, but she was of special interest to the children because of her knowledge of witches, “Gobble-uns,” and “Black Things.” She entertains the family’s children with her stories of little boys and girls being carried off by these supernatural creatures as punishment for being ill-behaved:
You better mind yer parunts an’ yer teachers fond an’ dear,An’ churish them ’at loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear,An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ’at clusters all about,Er the Gobble-uns’ll git youEf you Don’tWatchOut!
Peter Revell is correct in maintaining that the overt didacticism of “Little Orphant Annie” is atypical of Riley’s verse, but he probably underestimates Riley’s inclination to introduce such dark elements into “the usually sunny world of Hoosierdom.” This element of darkness in Riley’s poetry is especially apparent in one of his earliest efforts, “The Old Swimmin’-Hole.”
“The Old Swimmin’-Hole”
Originally published in Indianapolis Journal on June 17, 1882, and reprinted as the title poem in Riley’s first book, “The Old Swimmin’-Hole” proved to be one of the best-loved poems of the 1880’s and 1890’s, and it is easy to see why. It draws on that universal tendency to long for a happier, simpler, and ostensibly problem-free past, whether that past be personal or national. In Riley’s poem, the highly sentimentalized past is embodied in the controlling image of the swimming-hole, something that would be alien to the experience of most modern readers, but which in Riley’s day would be readily acceptable as the vivid symbol of a carefree, self-indulgent youth. Riley’s persona—an “old man” from whom “old Time’s tuck his toll”—seems to strike a precarious mental balance between smiling nostalgia and acute depression, something that is quite uncharacteristic of Riley’s work. The persona recalls that the “gurgle” of the “baby-river” of his boyhood sounded “like the laugh of something we onc’t ust to know/ Before we could remember anything but the eyes/ Of the angels lookin’ out as we left Paradise.” This is an atypically profound way for a Riley poem to begin, and it takes an even more atypical turn as the potentially rich Wordsworthian concept of a prenatal existence is dropped in favor of a narcissistic interpretation of the attractions of the swimming-hole.
Perhaps sensing that he was moving rather too close to the psychological implications of the swimming hole, Riley does not pursue the poetic possibilities of the water imagery and instead has the persona recall playing hooky to go swimming. Immediately, however, the element of depression that so striates this poem becomes overt. After a typically Rileyan catalog of vague country delights, the final stanza makes explicit the connection between the mind of the persona and the swimming hole: “When I last saw the place,/ The scenes was all changed, like a change in my face,” and his response to those twin facts is not at all what one would expect in a poem by Riley. “I wish in my sorrow I could strip to the soul,/ And dive off in my grave like the old swimmin’-hole.” A Riley persona with suicidal tendencies? Incredible as this may sound, the words on the page, taken at face value, would certainly suggest that the persona is reacting to his aging and the changes in his environment less with cheery nostalgia than with desires for oblivion, even self-destruction.
Riley’s contemporary readers evidently chose not to acknowledge the blatant darker aspects of “The Old Swimmin’-Hole,” aspects that may reflect the carefully nonpublicized side of the poet (offstage, “Sunny Jim” Riley drank heavily and suffered from exhaustion and depression), or which may reflect the angst-ridden modern person living in a world of isolation and extraordinary change. Much as the speaker in Riley’s “Griggsby’s Station” yearns to return to “where we ust to be so happy and so pore,” far from “the city! city! city!” where there is “none that neighbors with us, or we want to go and see,” so too the persona in “The Old Swimmin’-Hole” longs to escape from the miseries of his adult life but realizes that there can be no turning back. Unquestionably there was a dark side to sunny Hoosierdom, but it was a side that neither Riley nor his millions of readers cared to probe. For better or for worse, he will go down in literary history as “Sunny Jim” Riley.
