Boys and Girls The Verses of James W. Foley — Inside the Classic

Marching Orders and Make-Believe Armies

The Boyville Cadets appear in several poems, most notably in a long narrative that follows their mock battle from formation to funeral. Foley builds the scene through precise, rhythmic details: the clatter and patter of feet, a fife and drum, a willow pole with a red woolen shirt for a flag. The cadets are described as 'mostly barelegged and coatless and brown,' a make-believe army that nonetheless follows strict orders—'Attention! Right shoulder! Guide right!'—until a mother's call breaks the spell. The poem ends with a return to domestic duty: 'there's wood to be split and there's water to get / In the dull private life of the Boyville Cadet.' This movement between grand illusion and mundane reality is a structural pattern Foley repeats throughout the collection.

The Recurring Figure of the Lost Child

Foley returns to the image of a child who is lost—or who feels lost—in several poems. In 'The Lost Child,' the speaker describes a child wandering away from home, while 'The Lost Boy' and 'The Lost Heart' treat emotional absence as a kind of vanishing. The poems often begin with a concrete setting—a street, a garden, a rainy night—then shift inward to the child's perspective. In 'Lonesome,' the speaker notes, 'I quite forgot my cares with him, nor could I well be sad, / As long as he was at my side.' The structure of these poems tends to move from external observation to interior feeling, then back to a resolution that reconnects the child with a parent or home. This pattern gives the collection a consistent emotional arc, even as the subjects vary.

Kitchens, Doughnuts, and Domestic Interiors

Many of Foley's poems are set in or around the kitchen, a space that functions as both a literal and symbolic center. 'Doughnutting Time' describes the smell and bustle of baking, while 'Kitchen Miracles' treats ordinary household tasks as wondrous. The poem 'A Domestic Ripple' uses the kitchen as a stage for family conflict and reconciliation. Foley's attention to sensory detail—the 'nozzle agin' th' bank' in a poem about Paul Revere, the 'old woolen shirt' used as a shroud—grounds these domestic scenes in tangible objects. The movement between kitchen and outdoors is a recurring structural device: a poem may begin with a child at a window, then follow the child outside, only to return to the kitchen at the end. This back-and-forth mirrors the daily rhythm of childhood, where adventure and safety are never far apart.

The Adult World as a Distant Echo

Foley frequently contrasts the child's world with the adult one, often through a shift in tone or perspective. In 'The Strenuous Life,' the speaker mocks adult seriousness, while 'When Grandpa Plays' shows an adult joining a child's game. The poem 'The Barriers' explicitly names the divide: 'They say it's all untrue!'—referring to stories of Paul Revere and Barbara Frietchie that adults dismiss as fiction. Foley's structure here is notable: he builds a vivid, believable scene from a child's point of view, then undercuts it with an adult's skepticism, only to reaffirm the child's version. This three-part movement—innocence, doubt, reaffirmation—appears in several poems, including 'The Delusion of Ghosts' and 'A Modern Miracle.' The adult world is never fully absent; it hovers at the edges of the poems, a reminder of the constraints that await.

Foley's Boys and Girls rewards attention to its small structural patterns: the way a poem about a lost child mirrors a poem about a lost toy, or how the cadets' mock battle echoes the real battles of history that adults debate. Readers may find it useful to track the recurring images of flags, woolen shirts, and wooden swords, and to notice how often a poem ends with a return to the domestic sphere. The collection is best read not as a sequence but as a set of variations on a few themes, each poem a different angle on the same fleeting moment of childhood.

Reading Foley’s poems about children drifting between lamplit kitchens and dusky yards, I remembered my own screen-door summers, that hinge between inside and out. Stray Birds — A Closer Reading gave me that same ache—not for a specific moment, but for the quiet shape of a day that has already passed. Just a soft echo, really.