Everything in Eugene Field's "Picnic-time" turns on one small verb. To "jine" is what a person does when committing to a church, yet the speaker, a country boy by his voice, uses it for something much less solemn. He joins the Baptists, the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians and the Methodists, and each time what he is really joining is the picnic. The poem is about the gap between religious loyalty and a healthy appetite, and the appetite wins every time.
The humour starts with the voice. Field writes in rustic dialect: "ag'in," "skeered," "sandwidges," "stummick." The misspellings set up the rhymes. "Presbyteriun" is bent into shape so it can land on "fun," and "jine" is made to rhyme with "mine" and "fine." The effect is deliberately a little clumsy, as if the boy were improvising. The lines are long and bouncy, running to about seven beats, and they pair off in couplets. The result is a galloping, sing-song rhythm that suits a child's excitement. Each of the three stanzas ends on nearly the same line, "I'm goin' to jine," which works as a refrain, and its repetition becomes the joke. We know where each stanza is heading, and the pleasure lies in how the boy gets there.
The details are comic and observant. In the first stanza the picnic is a small catalogue of childhood mishaps: girls "skeered to death with spiders, bugs, and ants," boys with "grass-stains on their go-to meetin' pants." That last phrase puts church and mischief into one pair of trousers. The stanza also borrows a line in quotation marks about "fields beyont the swellin' floods" standing "dressed in livin' green." The solemn phrasing sounds like a hymn about heaven, and the boy quietly reuses it to describe a grassy field where Sunday school meets sandwiches. Heaven is turned into a picnic ground.
The second stanza runs through the denominations like a scorecard. The Baptists are remembered for rain, and grandpa's joke that this is how "baptizo" is explained plays on the idea of baptism as immersion. The Episcopalians ("'Piscopils") are simply "a heap o' fun." The Presbyterians are "the boss of all the picnics," and the reason is entirely culinary: "puddin's, sallids, sandwidges, an' pies." The line "a feller wisht his stummick was as hungry as his eyes" is the sharpest in the poem. It is a familiar saying about greedy eyes, and here it is a child's honest complaint about having too little room for so much food. Notice what the boy remembers about each church. None of it is theology, only weather, fun and food.
The last stanza changes the vocabulary on purpose. The boy suddenly calls himself "a liberal universalist" and talks of "fellowship," "sect" and "het'rodox" articles of faith. It is grand language from someone who has been saying "skeered" and "jine," and the mismatch is funny. Even "D. V.," the old abbreviation for "God willing," gets tacked onto a date for a picnic. The boy dresses his greed in the vocabulary of religious tolerance, and the stanza ends with its best pun: "Their doctrine of fried chick'n is a savin' grace to me!" Fried chicken is the only doctrine he cares about, and "saving grace" gives it the dignity of salvation.
The poem is significant for how kindly it laughs. It could have been a hard satire on sectarian rivalry, but the boy has no quarrel with anyone. He takes what is good from every congregation, and his appetite becomes a kind of ecumenism. The joke at the churches' expense is gentle, since the picnics are what bring the community together, and in practice that matters more than the doctrines. What stays with the reader is the boy's cheerful, shameless logic and the way a rollicking rhythm makes it sound almost convincing.