Few poems are as openly in love with a single sensation as "Lickin's." George Burnett Devine takes something small, the scraping of a mixing bowl after baking begins, and treats it as a treasure worth remembering. The poem is a piece of nostalgia, but a particular kind: it has no grand sorrow in it, no sense of tragedy or loss. Its longing is cheerful, even greedy, and that is much of its charm.
The speaker begins by addressing us directly: "When your thoughts turn gently backwards / To them days of long ago." The word "gently" sets the tone at once. This is memory as a warm, unhurried drift, and the speaker assumes we all share it. By saying "your thoughts" rather than "my thoughts," he turns a private recollection into a common one, inviting every reader to dredge up a version of the same scene.
What makes the poem lively is its voice. Devine writes in dialect, or at least in a deliberately spoken, informal English: "them days," "them good old lickin's," "we wasn't sayin' nothin'," "I've et some fancy groceries." These grammatical slips are not carelessness. They create a speaker who sounds like a real person talking on a porch, and they match the world being remembered, one of plain kitchens and plain pleasures. A more polished diction would feel wrong for the subject. The dropped g's of "snoozin'," "grumblin'," and "totin'" give the verses a loose, easygoing swing, like someone talking without bothering to straighten up.
The most striking image is the speaker's description of himself and his siblings: "We were only little puppies / And be snoozin' in the hay." Calling children "puppies" is affectionate and exact. Puppies are eager, easily distracted, led by their noses, and that is just how the poem presents them, catching "a sniff of cookin'" and instantly shouting "Oh, boy! It's bakin' day!" The senses do the work here. We never see the kitchen in detail; instead we smell it, and the smell is enough to rouse a sleeping child. The quoted exclamation drops us into the moment itself, as if the speaker were hearing his younger self cry out.
The third stanza adds a small dose of honesty, which keeps the poem from becoming too sugary. The children "do a bit o' grumblin'" while carrying in the coal. Childhood chores are acknowledged, not airbrushed away. But the grumbling is quickly outweighed: "we wasn't sayin' nothin' / When we'd get the mixing bowl." The double negative, grammatically incorrect, is emotionally perfect, since silence is the sound of children entirely occupied with licking. Work is the price, the bowl is the reward, and the poem quietly understands that the reward tastes better for the effort.
Structurally, the poem is simple and tidy. It runs through five quatrains with a steady rhyme on the second and fourth lines of each stanza (ago/dough, hay/day, coal/bowl, cake/make, kid/did). The meter is a light, bouncing beat of roughly four stresses to a line, closer to a nursery rhyme or a folk song than to formal verse. That simplicity suits the content: the rhythm skips along as cheerfully as the children it describes. The rhymes are also pleasingly homely, with "dough" and "ago" linking past and kitchen in a single sound, and "kid" and "did" closing the poem on a firm, satisfied click.
The final stanza delivers the central idea. The speaker admits he has "et some fancy groceries" since childhood, a phrase that quietly suggests a life that has moved on to richer tastes. Yet none of it "taste[d] as tasty / As them good old lickin's did." The repetition of "tasty" after "taste" is almost a verbal lick of the lips. The point is that flavor in memory is tied to circumstance: the scraps from a mother's bowl were sweetened by hunger, play, family, and the thrill of a baking day. No later luxury can reproduce that.
What gives the poem its quiet significance is this recognition that the best things are often the humblest, and that we measure them not by their cost but by who was in the room. Ma, mentioned twice, is the unspoken center of the whole scene, the figure who "knowed how to make" the treats. The poem is a small tribute to her and to an ordinary, abundant kind of love, expressed in batter on a spoon.