Every child knows the kitchen as a place of smells and orders, and James Whitcomb Riley, often called Indiana's "Hoosier Poet" for his dialect verse, builds this poem from exactly that. A young speaker hangs around 'Lizabuth Ann, the hired girl, while she bakes a custard pie. The speaker is shooed away, then watches the Raggedy Man react to the smell from the lawn. Finally the speaker walks in on a secret the adults can't quite guess. On the surface it is a funny household anecdote. Underneath, it is about a child gradually bumping into the grown-up world of romance without having a name for it.
The voice carries most of the charm. Riley spells the child's speech the way it sounds: "ist" for just, "nen" for then, "wunst" for once, "somepin'" for something. Nothing here is polished or literary, which is the point. The constant "An' nen she'll... An' nen she'll..." gives the breathless rhythm of a child telling a story and afraid of being interrupted. Even the explanations are childlike. The pie is slid into the stove "so's 'twon't slop / An' git all spilled", and the whole process ends with a delighted "first thing you know!"
Riley is just as precise in the way he builds the stanzas. Each has fifteen lines, with a long, loosely four-beat narrative section followed by a short, snappy refrain. The rhymes in the first half hop around, and "top," "stop" and "slop" bounce against each other as if the poem were also being stirred. Then the refrain locks into place with "say / way / play" and "run / done." Its wording, "They's time fer work, an' time fer play!", sounds like a proverb, and the push-and-shove rhythm of "run, child, run!" makes you hear the apron flapping.
What makes the refrain clever is that it moves from speaker to speaker. In the first stanza it belongs to 'Lizabuth Ann. In the second, the Raggedy Man echoes it, changing only "I" to "she," after he leans on his scythe, sniffs, and announces, "Ef my old nose don't tell me lies, / It 'pears like I smell custard-pies!" The imagery is all about senses here, and his nose does the detective work. It is also a small joke that a man who "mows our lawn" ends up so close to the kitchen.
The third stanza is where the poem plays its best trick. The family comes home from the "Social" to find "A light in the kitchen door" and the sound of an accordion. Pa's guess, "who can her beau be?", sets up a mystery, and the answer lands in the last two lines, where "'Lizabuth Ann" rhymes with "The Raggedy Man." The rhyme itself pairs them. Notice too that this stanza leans on one sound, "she," "me," "see," "we," "be," and the poem judging by its sound seems almost to hum along with the accordion. The kitchen has also changed. Corn is being parched, not pie baked, and the refrain flips once more: "Take the hint, an' run, child, run! / Er we cain't git no courtin' done!" Work and play have been joined by a third category, and the child is the one now told to clear out.
The last refrain is slightly ambiguous. "Better say" suggests that the child imagines what the couple ought to tell the intruder, or perhaps the child is quoting them. Either way, the earlier stanzas have taught us the pattern, so we can hear the real message behind the child's innocent report.
What gives the poem its lasting appeal is that the child understands less than the reader does. We see a romance that the speaker only half grasps, and we see it warmly, because the people involved are drawn with affection rather than mockery. The hired girl is brisk and capable, the Raggedy Man is gentle and comic, and even Pa's puzzled "Lan'-- O'-Gracious!" has a kindly wink. A repeated line, a few misspellings and a pie are enough to turn an ordinary kitchen into a small, complete story.