Love-Songs of Childhood — Key Ideas to Explore

Recurring Images of Transit and Thresholds

Several poems build their action around journeys that blur the line between real and imagined travel. 'The Shut-Eye Train' invites a child to board as 'the evening shadows fall,' with a bell that goes 'Ting-a-ling!' and a whistle that goes 'Toot-toot!'—the train itself is a vehicle into sleep. 'The Ride to Bumpville' is a bumpy, playful ride 'over boulder and stump' that ends when the speaker admits 'I'm blowed if I ain't!' tired. 'The Fly-Away Horse' offers another aerial escape. These transit poems share a structure: an invitation, a rhythmic motion, and a gentle arrival at a destination that is also a state of rest or play. The repetition of such journeys across the collection suggests a deliberate patterning, not a random assortment.

Dialect and the Comic Voice

Field frequently adopts a colloquial, dialect-heavy speaker, especially in poems about boyhood adventures. 'Picnic-Time' uses contractions and eye-dialect ('stummick,' 'jine,' 'grampa') to create a persona that is both nostalgic and humorous. The speaker recounts joining different church picnics—Baptist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian—and praises the Methodists' 'doctrine of fried chick'n.' Similarly, 'The Bench-Legged Fyce' and 'The Duel' employ vernacular rhythms and comic situations. These poems contrast sharply with the more lyrical, standard-English lullabies. The juxtaposition suggests that Field saw childhood as encompassing both the tender and the rowdy, and he gave each mode its own distinct linguistic register.

The Dialogue Between Age and Youth

Several poems stage conversations or contrasts between an older and a younger figure. 'Shuffle-Shoon and Amber-Locks' presents an old man and a little child building blocks together; the child speaks of the future ('When I grow to be a man'), while the old man reflects on the past ('Thus I builded long ago!'). The poem ends with them side by side, 'Heedless of the fleeting day.' 'The Brook' offers a more solitary version of this theme: the speaker recalls looking into a brook as a child and hearing it say 'Hasten with me / To the roistering sea,' but later, as an adult, the brook seems to say 'Come with me / To the slumbrous sea.' The final line—'I would to God that a child were I!'—explicitly voices a longing for lost youth. These poems give the collection an elegiac undertow beneath its playful surface.

Structure: From Lullaby to Farewell

The collection opens with 'The Rock-a-By Lady,' a lullaby that establishes sleep as a central theme, and closes with 'Over the Hills and Far Away,' which ends with the line 'And we'll all go a-sailing beyond the sea.' In between, the poems alternate between quiet, rhythmic pieces and boisterous narratives. The table of contents shows no strict thematic grouping, but the opening and closing poems frame the book as a journey from the nursery into the wider world and back again. The dedication to his aunt, who sang him to sleep, reinforces this circular structure. Readers may notice that the same images—poppies, trains, rocking, sailing—recur across poems, creating echoes that reward a sequential reading rather than a random dip.

Field's Love-Songs of Childhood rewards attention to its structural patterns: the repeated journey motif, the alternation of lyrical and comic voices, and the dialogue between age and youth. The poems are best read in order, as the opening lullaby and closing voyage frame a collection that moves between tenderness and mischief. Readers interested in the interplay of form and theme will find a carefully arranged sequence, not merely a miscellany.

I found myself drifting back to my mother’s voice while reading Field’s lullabies, how sleep there felt like a gentle train pulling out of a station. It reminded me of a quieter collection, The answering voice — Background and Themes, where that same patient hush seems to wait on the page, asking only to be overheard.