Our Boys, and Other Poems — Reading Companion

Diction and the Child-Soldier Voice

Strang's word choices oscillate between the formal and the domestic. In "Our Boys," he uses military imperatives—"Halt! Attention!"—and elevated phrases like "liberty shall reign supreme." But in "A Small Boy's Desire," the diction drops to playground level: "shoot him in the pants" and "do my little bit." This shift is not accidental; it mirrors the poet's own age and the imagined voice of a child who wants to be a soldier. The poem "Our Soldier Boy" traces a boy's growth from building snow forts to trench warfare, using concrete, childlike details: "snowballs were his hand grenades, / A stick his bayonette." The spelling "bayonette" (instead of bayonet) may be a juvenile error or a deliberate archaism, but it underscores the homemade quality of the verse. Strang rarely uses abstract nouns without anchoring them in physical actions—"fighting," "marching," "shooting"—which keeps the poems grounded in a child's understanding of war as adventure.

Structural Patterns and Repetition

The poems rely heavily on anaphora and parallel structure. "A Small Boy's Desire" repeats "I want to be a soldier" at the start of each stanza, creating a litany-like effect that emphasizes the speaker's single-minded wish. "Our Boys" uses a refrain-like closing couplet in each stanza, with variations on "The boys are marching by" and "They are our country's pride." This repetition gives the collection a chant-like quality, suitable for recitation. Strang also employs a consistent ABAB rhyme scheme and iambic meter, though he occasionally breaks rhythm for emphasis—for instance, the truncated line "And all they had they gave" in "Our Boys" adds weight to the idea of total sacrifice. The poems are short, rarely exceeding four stanzas, which suggests a young writer's limited stamina or a deliberate choice to keep the message simple and direct. The structure of the collection itself moves from general patriotic pieces to more personal tributes, ending with the thrift-stamp poem, which ties war effort to home-front economics.

Setting and the Absence of the Front

Despite the subject matter, the poems contain almost no description of actual battlefields. The setting is overwhelmingly the home front: marching columns, snow forts, scout hikes, and the speaker's own room. In "Our Soldier Boy," the trenches are mentioned only as "over there," a vague location. The enemy is reduced to cartoonish figures—"wicked 'Hun'" and "Boches"—and violence is euphemized: "shoot him in the pants" or "drop bombs on the German towns." The only sensory detail of war is the uniform: "khaki suit" appears repeatedly. This absence of mud, blood, or fear reflects the poet's distance from combat and his reliance on secondhand imagery from posters and newsreels. The poems are set in a mental landscape where war is a game of dress-up and adventure, not a catastrophe. Even the thrift-stamp poem, which introduces economic sacrifice, frames it as a child's desire to "do my little bit" rather than a grim necessity.

The Authorial Persona and the Paratexts

The collection's framing devices—the introduction by J. L. Strang and the prefatory poem "To the Reader of this Book"—construct a specific persona for the young author. The introduction emphasizes his "gentle, loving disposition" and "mental development far in advance of his years," positioning him as a prodigy whose early death adds pathos. The prefatory poem directly addresses the reader: "This little book's a letter, I send direct to you." This epistolary conceit collapses the distance between poet and audience, making the reader a confidant. Strang signs off "Yours very truly," a conventional but effective gesture of sincerity. The poems themselves often include dedications—to his brother, to the thrift stamp drive—which personalize the war effort. Together, these elements create a voice that is simultaneously innocent and earnest, a child speaking to adults about adult matters. The paratexts thus frame the poems not as literary artifacts but as intimate communications, which may explain their direct, unadorned style.

Readers approaching Our Boys, and Other Poems should attend to the gap between the poet's age and the gravity of his subject. Strang's work is not a mature commentary on war but a record of how a child processed nationalistic rhetoric through the limited tools of rhyme and meter. The poems reward attention to their small, concrete details—the stick bayonet, the khaki suit, the desire to "shoot him in the pants"—which reveal a mind translating adult slogans into a child's game. The collection is best read as a historical document of home-front sentiment and as an example of juvenile literary production during wartime.

There’s something tender about a child’s voice trying to hold the weight of war, and Strang’s poems carry that ache without ever straining. It makes me think of another quiet collection I keep close, Songs of the Silent World, and Other Poems — Context and Discussion, which lingers in similar hushed spaces. Some books just stay with you like that.