A doctor drives up in a horse-drawn carriage, opens a box, and out comes a baby. Eugene Field takes the old tale of babies delivered by the doctor and gives it a twist: this baby is bow-legged, and everyone is thrilled about it. Nobody apologises for the legs or tries to fix them. The community adjusts to the child instead, and the poem ends with the speaker hoping the same doctor will bring one for him. Its central idea is simple and warm: what might be called a flaw can be the very thing that makes someone dear.
The sound of the poem does much of the persuading. The lines gallop along in a bouncy, rolling meter, so that "Who should come up the road one day / But the doctor-man in his two-wheel shay!" sounds like hooves and wheels. Couplets (day/shay, wide/inside, law/saw) click shut with nursery-rhyme neatness. Each stanza then ends with a three-line refrain, "What a cute little boy! / What a funny little boy! / What a dear little bow-leg boy!", which repeats almost word for word. It plays the part of a chorus of onlookers, and its sing-song insistence makes the admiration feel like something the whole village joins in on. The repetition is also the joke's engine. By the sixth stanza we know the refrain so well that the speaker can slip it into his own wish, and the crowd's cry becomes his personal longing.
The imagery is playfully geometric. The legs are first treated as a problem of mathematics: "Observing a strict geometrical law, / They cut out his panties with a circular saw." (Judging by the context, "panties" here means little trousers.) The mock-scientific tone makes tailoring sound like engineering, and the circular saw is a comic exaggeration, as if curved legs needed machinery. His walk becomes an "oval stride," and once he is given a wheel, the curves pile up: wheel, pedals, and a boy who "bowls along." That last phrase is a nice double meaning, since a bowl is round and bowling is rolling, so the boy's shape and his motion become one. The circle even matches the poem's own structure, because the refrain keeps returning to where it began.
Field's word choices are tender but not simple. "Cute" and "dear" are plainly affectionate, but "funny" does double work, meaning both amusing and odd. The poem lets the oddness stay in view while wrapping it in love. "Cunning little mite" uses "cunning" in its old sense of charming, and "mite" shrinks the baby to something fragile and precious. The diminutives pile up ("little" appears in every refrain), yet the boy himself is far from fragile. He sits "so straight" and pedals "so strong," with "eyes aflame" and "cheeks aglow," laughing "aha" and "oho." The legs that might have marked him as lacking become the way he moves through the world at full speed. By the end "the world is filled and thrilled with the joy" of him, an enormous claim for such a small figure, and the poem's good humour makes it believable.
The last stanza turns the poem from story into wish. The speaker would ask the doctor for "the treasure I'd fain possess," and the slangy "honest Injun! can't you guess?" invites the reader to join the game. That phrase is a dated expression, and many readers today would find it insensitive. It is a reminder that the poem belongs to an earlier time and its language has aged unevenly. The answer to the riddle is the refrain once more, but now it is spoken with desire rather than from the crowd. He does not ask for a perfect child, only for this one.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. Its plot is slight and its rhymes are easy, yet it quietly reverses a common instinct, which is to see difference as something to be corrected. Here difference is a gift delivered in a special box. A modern reader may find the repetition sugary, but the cheerful absurdity of the saw and the wheel keeps sentiment from turning soggy. The poem ends up being both a joke and a small act of generosity toward the child it describes.