James Whitcomb Riley

Thinkin' Back

{{sc|I've}} ben thinkin' back, of late,
S'prisin'!—And I'm here to state
I'm suspicious it's a sign
Of age, maybe, or decline
Of my faculties,—and yit
I'm not feelin' old a bit—

Age math deflection

Classic Riley move—pretending sixty-four isn't old while the whole poem proves otherwise. The double negative ('Ain't no young man any more') admits what he just denied.

Any more than sixty-four
Ain't no young man any more!
Thinkin' back's a thing 'at grows
On a feller, I suppose—
Older 'at he gits, i jack,
More he keeps a-thinkin' back!
Old as old men git to be,
Er as middle-aged as me,
Folks'll find us, eye and mind
Fixed on what we've left behind—
Rehabilitatin'-like

Rehabilitatin'-like

Riley invented this word. Not 'remembering' or 'recalling'—he's actively reconstructing and restoring those moments, making them live again.

Them old times we used to hike
Out barefooted fer the crick,

April swimming

Indiana creek water in early April would be near freezing. That 'Ooh! my-oh!' is genuine physical memory—his body still feels the shock decades later.

'Long 'bout Aprile first—to pick
Out some "warmest" place to go
In a-swimmin'—Ooh! my-oh!
Wonder now we hadn't died!
Grate horseradish on my hide
Jes' a-thinkin' how cold then
That-'ere worter must 'a' ben!
Thinkin' back—W'y, goodness me!
I kin call their names and see
Every little tad I played
With, er fought, er was afraid
Of, and so made him the best

Childhood logic

Kids make friends through conflict resolution. The boy he was scared of became his best friend because fear forced intimacy—he had to negotiate, understand, connect.

Friend I had of all the rest!
Thinkin' back, I even hear
Them a-callin', high and clear,
Up the crick-banks, where they seem
Still hid in there—like a dream—
And me still a-pantin' on
The green pathway they have gone!

Present tense shift

Watch the verbs: 'Still they hide... Still they hide.' Not 'hid.' In memory, his dead friends are permanently alive, permanently ahead on the path.

Still they hide, by bend er ford—
Still they hide—but, thank the Lord,
(Thinkin' back, as I have said),
I hear laughin' on ahead!

Laughin' on ahead

The friends aren't behind him in the past—they're ahead, waiting. Riley reverses the usual death metaphor: they didn't stay back in childhood, they went forward without him.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Riley's Dialect as Time Machine

James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916) was Indiana's most famous poet, known for Hoosier dialect verse that made him wealthy on the lecture circuit. But this poem's dialect isn't just folksy charm—it's doing temporal work.

Notice how the dropped g's and colloquialisms ('i jack,' 'worter,' 'tad') transport you to rural 1850s Indiana without Riley having to describe it. The voice itself is the time machine. When he writes 'Rehabilitatin'-like'—a word he appears to have coined—the awkward construction mimics the awkward work of memory reconstruction. He's not passively remembering; he's actively rebuilding.

The poem's central trick is in lines 7-8: 'I'm not feelin' old a bit— / Any more than sixty-four / Ain't no young man any more!' That double negative does double work—it's both comic deflection and admission. Riley knows exactly what he's doing: spending forty-two lines proving he feels old by insisting he doesn't.

The Physics of Memory

CONTEXT Riley wrote this late in life, during the nostalgia boom of early 1900s America—when rapid industrialization made rural childhoods feel impossibly distant. But he's not writing generic nostalgia.

Look at the sensory precision: 'Grate horseradish on my hide' for the pain of cold water. Not 'it was cold'—his skin remembers the specific burn of April creek water. That 'Ooh! my-oh!' interrupts the syntax like the cold interrupted his breath. Riley's body is doing the remembering.

The final stanza flips the poem's physics. His friends aren't behind him in the past—they're 'on ahead,' still moving forward, still hiding around the next bend. In Riley's memory-world, the dead don't recede; they lead. He's not looking back at childhood; he's 'still a-pantin'' trying to catch up to it. The 'green pathway' they've taken isn't death as ending—it's death as continuation of the game, hide-and-seek extended into eternity. 'Thank the Lord' he can still hear them laughing, still playing, still waiting for him to find them.