Long before Kentucky-born Elizabeth Madox Roberts became known for novels such as *The Time of Man*, she published *Under the Tree* in 1922, a collection that listens closely to the voices of rural children. Roberts grew up in central Kentucky, and her poems often capture the ordinary textures of farmhouse life—siblings, home remedies, small illnesses turned into family events. “Mumps” comes from that world, where an outbreak of a childhood disease was not a medical crisis so much as a shared domestic drama.
The poem follows a child narrator who feels “a feeling in my neck” and notices “two big bumps”; soon the word “mumps” arrives at the end of the stanza, as if the diagnosis were part of the rhyme itself. The mother ties a rag around the speaker’s jaw, then ties Will and John, leaving only Dick without a “mump rag.” That phrase is wonderfully plain and physical, and the repetition of “tied” makes the mother’s care sound like a ritual. Dick, the healthy one, teases the others by chanting “vinegar and lemon drops / And pickles!”—sharp, acid foods that would sting a swollen throat—just to make them cry. By Tuesday, though, Dick is “very sad” and crying because his own neck is sore, and the poem ends quietly: “not a one said sour things / To anybody any more.”
The central idea grows from that final line. Empathy, the poem suggests, often comes not from being scolded but from feeling the same hurt yourself. The word “sour” carries the poem’s double meaning: it points back to the vinegar, lemon, and pickles, but it also describes words used to wound. Once Dick feels the soreness in his neck, his power to tease collapses, and the other children do not tease him in return. Their silence is not triumph; it is recognition. The children could have answered Dick with sour words of their own, but the poem chooses a gentler resolution, and that choice is the emotional core.
The construction is as homespun as the story. Four quatrains use a steady, mostly iambic rhythm and a loose ABCB rhyme scheme—bumps/mumps, John/on, by/cry, sore/more—so the poem sounds like a skipping rhyme or a remembered family song. That light bounce keeps the pain from becoming heavy. The imagery stays close to the body and the household: a neck, two bumps, the repeated tying, a rag around the jaw. The only strong sensory burst comes in Dick’s taunt, where “vinegar,” “lemon drops,” and “pickles” are so vivid they almost make a reader’s mouth pucker. The break after “anything” in “I couldn’t swallow anything / At all because I had the mumps” also gives the word “mumps” extra weight, as though the speaker is still surprised by it.
What makes “Mumps” significant is its restraint. Roberts does not moralize, does not exaggerate the illness, and does not turn Dick into a villain. She lets the ordinary details—a mother’s rag, a sibling’s chant, a Tuesday cry—build a small drama about how suffering can soften rivalry. At the same time, the poem preserves a vanished world before vaccination, when mumps was common enough to be a household rite rather than a rare disease. That blend of humor, remembered childhood, and earned sympathy keeps the poem tender rather than sentimental.