A dog who is "as tall settin' down as he wuz standin' up" is not meant to be taken solemnly, and that is the charm of Eugene Field's portrait of the bench-legged fyce. The speaker piles up the comedy: a yellow dog, long in the body, with a tail so lively that "the tail it wagged him." Behind the jokes, though, the poem is making a quiet argument. A boy's dog, however ridiculous, becomes a lasting emblem of loyalty and of childhood itself.
The voice does much of the work. The poem is spoken in rustic dialect, with "dorgs," "yaller," "vittles," "wrassled" and "hev," and it sounds like a man leaning on a fence and settling in to talk. The spelling does more than decorate. It tells us who is speaking and how little he cares about polish. Yet he can't resist the occasional grand word. The dog's nickname, Sooner, comes from "his predisposition to chronic repose," a mock-scholarly phrase for plain laziness. When the dog barks at a tramp, the speaker marvels at the "bosom o' his'n" that holds "so much bass." Fancy diction pinned onto a scruffy mutt is a steady source of humor, and it also shows the speaker's affection, since people only exaggerate like this about what they love.
The comedy has a pattern. Each stanza adds a trait, and each trait is a little more flattering than the last. We begin with a dog who is lazy and "contented to be / On peaceable terms with the neighbors," then meet one who dominates the road, and finally one who is gentle with children. The key phrase is "what he took hold of he never let go." In context it is a joke: a "dude" courting the speaker's sister loses "a slice / Of his white flannel suit." Two stanzas later the same stubborn grip pays off in earnest, when the Hobart boy falls through the ice and the dog "wuz drug clean ashore." The poem never lingers on the danger or announces the dog's heroism. The rescue sits in a single line, in the same offhand tone as the torn trousers, and that restraint makes it land harder. The dog's comic trait turns out to be the root of his courage.
The form suits this easy storytelling. Each of the eight stanzas has six lines in rhymed couplets, and the rhythm gallops in a bouncing, anapestic way that reads aloud almost like a jingle. The rhymes are often playful: "vice" and "fyce," "slim" and "him," "pup" and "up." The word "fyce" returns as a rhyme at the end of several stanzas, along with its partners "nice," "ice" and "slice." It works like a refrain, so that the dog's name keeps arriving as the punchline.
The ending is where the poem changes. In the seventh stanza the speaker steps back from anecdote to a general statement: "I wouldn't give much for the boy 'at grows up / With no friendship subsistin' 'tween him an' a pup!" The last line of the stanza, "When a fellow gits old - I tell you it's nice / To think of his youth and his bench-legged fyce," is the last time the dog appears. The final stanza drops him entirely. Its four "To think of" lines have no main verb and read like a list of memories surfacing one after another: "peach-trees abloom," "daisies ablow," "little legs wrassled an' little han's strove." The rhyme moves away from "fyce" to "truth" and "youth," and the diction rises to "loyalty, valor, an' truth" and "hallow." Words that would sound pompous applied to a dog now sound earned, because the earlier stanzas have shown a dog who deserved them. The dog has been absorbed into the season he belonged to.
That sleight of hand is what makes the poem worth reading. It never claims that a dog is secretly noble, and it never turns sentimental in the middle. It lets us laugh at the crooked legs for seven stanzas and then shows that the laughter was a form of love. The final lines suggest that old age is made partly of such memories, and that a funny animal can be the place where a person keeps his best, most loyal early years.