Nobody in "Longing" is ever content, and that is exactly the joke. George Burnett Devine walks a group of speakers, always "we," through five stages of life, and at each one they want something they don't have. The surprise comes at the end. After a lifetime of looking ahead, the forty-five-year-olds finally look back and wish they were boys again. The poem's central idea is that desire keeps moving: whatever stage you're in, the grass seems greener on the other side of your own life, and the one place you can never return to turns out to be the one you want most.
The structure does the arguing for the poem. Each stanza belongs to a numbered age: four, ten, twelve, twenty-five, forty-five. These are marked in the opening line of nearly every stanza, so the reader feels time ticking forward like a series of signposts. Notice, though, that the wishes go through a curious arc. The wants of a small child and a ten-year-old are physical and messy, while the wants of a twelve-year-old and a young adult are about freedom and romance. Then comes a loop: the final stanza circles right back to childhood. The poem ends where it began, only now what was once taken for granted has become precious.
The imagery is wonderfully unglamorous in the early stanzas. At four, the speakers long "to play with lousy dogs / Then get our hair full o' fleas." Nobody sensible would call fleas a prize, yet the poem presents them as part of the fun, and the word "lousy" is almost affectionate. At ten it's "slimy frogs" and "stinging bumble bees," and the wish to "climb, / Like chattering monkeys in the trees." The adjectives here (slimy, stinging, chattering) are all sensory and a little gross, which is precisely how children experience the world: through touch, noise and mess. Seen from adulthood, those discomforts have turned into charm, and the poem quietly shows how memory sands off the rough edges.
The middle stanzas shift the tone. At twelve the longing is for "man's estate," a slightly formal, old-fashioned phrase that fits a boy borrowing grown-up language for something he only half understands. What he pictures is freedom, to "come and go / Wherever fancy seemed to call," or to "travel with a medicine show." The medicine show, a traveling entertainment, suits the daydream of a boy who imagines adulthood as endless adventure with no one telling him where to be. At twenty-five the desire turns romantic and acquisitive: "pretty girls," "a million bucks," "rings and strings of pearls." The rhyme of "girls" and "pearls" has a slightly breathless, showy quality, like someone imagining that money will buy love.
Then the last stanza lands with a gentle thump. "And now, by gosh, at forty-five" has the tone of a man shrugging and chuckling at himself. That "by gosh" is the poem's whole attitude in two words: plainspoken, a little rueful, not at all solemn. What the speakers want now is "to dream of pirate's gold, / And to play with kiddies' toys." Pirate's gold echoes the twenty-five-year-old's "million bucks," but transformed, since money has become make-believe again. The lovely irony is that they now long to dream of longing, to get back the capacity for wanting things innocently.
Formally the poem is simple. The stanzas are four-line units with a loose, bouncy rhythm and an alternating rhyme on the second and fourth lines (please/fleas, bees/trees, boys/toys), while the first and third lines mostly go unrhymed. Some lines run long and a little uneven, which gives the voice a talky, conversational feel, closer to a story told on a porch than to polished literary verse. That plainness is the point. A fancier style would make the poem's observation sound like a lecture; instead it sounds like something everyone already knew and had simply never put so neatly.
What makes "Longing" worth reading is how much it says without ever sounding heavy. It never complains about growing old; it smiles at it. Anyone who has envied an older sibling, or caught themselves missing a younger, simpler self, will recognize the pattern the poem lays out.