Every child who has ever been scolded has run away at least once in the imagination, and "Planning the Future" captures that fantasy with such affectionate accuracy that it is hard not to smile. George Burnett Devine frames the poem as a memory: the speaker recalls the days when his mother "would tan my hide," and the only creature he could confide in was his dog. What follows is a business plan for freedom, delivered in a boy's own voice and with a boy's total seriousness.
The poem's central idea is that childhood dreams of independence are really inventories of annoyances. Look at what the boy wants to escape: wash rags, school, errands, girls who "tattle on a feller," and the dreaded cry of "Go wash your neck and ears!" His paradise is defined almost entirely by absence. "There won't be any wash rags, / And there won't be any school" is not a vision of what life will contain but a list of what it won't. The real subject is not the West at all. It is the boy's irritation with being managed.
The language does a great deal of the work. Devine writes in dialect, dropping consonants and bending spellings: "An' Ma," "clost to a swimmin' pool," "waller 'round the river." These choices make the speaker sound like a real kid talking rather than an adult imitating one, and they give the poem its warmth. Words like "burg" and "feller" place the voice in an earlier, small-town American idiom, which suits the dream of lighting out for the West. The boy has clearly absorbed the romance of frontier stories, and his plan borrows their furniture: a cabin, bear and possum hunting, a "great big fortune."
What makes the imagery funny is the way grand ambitions collide with childish logic. The fortune will buy "some choo-choo cars," a toy-box dream dressed as a railroad empire. The boy will smoke a pipe and later "big black cigars," the ultimate symbols of grown-up freedom in his eyes, while the dog's reward is "the fleas" and, later, "a collar." There is a quiet comedy in that division of spoils. The boy imagines himself generous, yet the dog gets parasites and a leash accessory. Even the plan to "fight the bumble bees" shows a mind that treats danger as sport, with no sense of consequence.
Structurally, the poem is as tidy as the boy's logic is not. It moves in regular quatrains, each with a rough ballad rhythm of alternating longer and shorter lines, and a rhyme scheme that links the second and fourth lines of each stanza (hide/confide, West/rest, pool/school). That simple pattern echoes the sing-song of nursery verse, which fits a child speaker. The poem's shape also mirrors the dream itself: it opens with a complaint, builds into a long list of promises introduced by the dog-addressed quotation, and then winds down.
That ending is the cleverest move. "And so on, and so on, and so on" is the narrator's gentle way of admitting that the fantasy could go on indefinitely, that every plan spawns another. The final stanza steps outside the boy's voice and settles on a tender image: "a faithful little doggie / And a little boy of nine." The adult speaker looking back is not mocking his younger self. He lets the plan stand in its absurdity and its sincerity at once, and the specific detail of the boy's age, nine, fixes the moment in memory.
The poem is worth reading because it takes a small, universal feeling seriously without inflating it. It reminds us that the urge to escape is often a way of asking for a world with fewer rules and more loyalty, and the one loyal listener the boy needs is a dog who never objects to the plan.