The way I interpreted this song was very much shaped by a particular person I was thinking of at the time, but I keep it in my head, and though I don’t think it’s the intended meaning, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to read it the way I do.
What I see is a song about someone who is desperately trying and failing to throw away the childish aspects of himself because he’s been stuck for too long not acting his age.
I interpreted “toy broken boy soldier” to mean something like “someone who grew up acting disciplined like a soldier, letting himself be treated as a toy, until it broke him.” Again, I was thinking about a loved one (who has told me in depth about their struggle with an experience like this) when I had this association, so it made me think of the cycle of children forced to act like adults by their circumstances only to become adults who can’t escape their childish nature.
It feels like a problem to them that, despite the fact that they’ve grown up, they can’t seem to get rid of the aspects of themselves that feel childish. Sometimes it’s a genuine unhealthy behaviour, some kind of over-dependence on a perceived authority figure or extreme difficulties with confrontation to the point of reading others’ feelings as attacks, while other times it’s just liking to sit on a swing set or sleep with a plushie or ask for help now and again. Sometimes the thing that feels like a crime is having emotions.
“First Love/Late Spring” by Mitski has a pair of couplets about this that I think of from time to time. The first is “Wild women don’t get the blues, but I find / that lately I’ve been crying like a tall child” and the second is “And I was so young when I behaved twenty-five / but now I find I’ve grown into a tall child.” In that song she describes being overly emotional in her eyes, crying easily, feeling like her chest will cave in if she doesn’t hear from the one she loves. She’s admitting and succumbing to the childishness she’s so ashamed of, while Jack White’s narrator has a much angrier approach. There’s something to be said about gender roles here, but I’ve gone long enough.
“Pulling my questions from the shelf” could mean he’s not making his questions available anymore (pulled from shelves = recall or something to that effect) and is trying to handle everything entirely by himself. Interestingly, he says “I’m going back to school today, but I’m dropping myself off” as if the childish part of going to school is being dropped off & not the age that schoolchildren are? Which I think goes to show that as much as he wants to act like an adult, the roles of adult and child have been so blended in his mind that he doesn’t know where to begin.
The last thing I want to touch on is admittedly probably a stretch but I thought it was an interesting way to read the verse.
“You're rifling through a box of toys
That were handed down to me
Just take all the ones you want and then
Give the rest to my family”
This can obviously be read as his overzealous attempts to destroy the child in him leading to him getting rid of precious things—these sound like heirlooms, not a toy he got as a middle schooler and kinda liked but wasn’t that attached to.
But another way to read it, my “stretch before you reach” reading, is that the box of toys represents the circumstances that made him this way to begin with. A burden that was handed down to him by generations of trauma and immature adults. If you don’t take his burden from him, it will go back into his family and the cycle will continue.
So what I see in this song is a man who feels he cannot adapt to being an adult, and whose perceptions of the roles of adult and child are mixed up to begin with, who feels angry and broken and wants to forcefully fix what he perceives as the problem. He targets his dependence on others—he’s only going to ask himself questions, he’ll be dropping himself off from now on—and tries to discard everything that reminds him of his childhood, like his passed-down toys and his memories. His misguidedness leads to an endless cycle of child and man and child again, he never truly grows up.
The way I interpreted this song was very much shaped by a particular person I was thinking of at the time, but I keep it in my head, and though I don’t think it’s the intended meaning, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to read it the way I do.
What I see is a song about someone who is desperately trying and failing to throw away the childish aspects of himself because he’s been stuck for too long not acting his age.
I interpreted “toy broken boy soldier” to mean something like “someone who grew up acting disciplined like a soldier, letting himself be treated as a toy, until it broke him.” Again, I was thinking about a loved one (who has told me in depth about their struggle with an experience like this) when I had this association, so it made me think of the cycle of children forced to act like adults by their circumstances only to become adults who can’t escape their childish nature.
It feels like a problem to them that, despite the fact that they’ve grown up, they can’t seem to get rid of the aspects of themselves that feel childish. Sometimes it’s a genuine unhealthy behaviour, some kind of over-dependence on a perceived authority figure or extreme difficulties with confrontation to the point of reading others’ feelings as attacks, while other times it’s just liking to sit on a swing set or sleep with a plushie or ask for help now and again. Sometimes the thing that feels like a crime is having emotions.
“First Love/Late Spring” by Mitski has a pair of couplets about this that I think of from time to time. The first is “Wild women don’t get the blues, but I find / that lately I’ve been crying like a tall child” and the second is “And I was so young when I behaved twenty-five / but now I find I’ve grown into a tall child.” In that song she describes being overly emotional in her eyes, crying easily, feeling like her chest will cave in if she doesn’t hear from the one she loves. She’s admitting and succumbing to the childishness she’s so ashamed of, while Jack White’s narrator has a much angrier approach. There’s something to be said about gender roles here, but I’ve gone long enough.
“Pulling my questions from the shelf” could mean he’s not making his questions available anymore (pulled from shelves = recall or something to that effect) and is trying to handle everything entirely by himself. Interestingly, he says “I’m going back to school today, but I’m dropping myself off” as if the childish part of going to school is being dropped off & not the age that schoolchildren are? Which I think goes to show that as much as he wants to act like an adult, the roles of adult and child have been so blended in his mind that he doesn’t know where to begin.
The last thing I want to touch on is admittedly probably a stretch but I thought it was an interesting way to read the verse.
“You're rifling through a box of toys That were handed down to me Just take all the ones you want and then Give the rest to my family”
This can obviously be read as his overzealous attempts to destroy the child in him leading to him getting rid of precious things—these sound like heirlooms, not a toy he got as a middle schooler and kinda liked but wasn’t that attached to.
But another way to read it, my “stretch before you reach” reading, is that the box of toys represents the circumstances that made him this way to begin with. A burden that was handed down to him by generations of trauma and immature adults. If you don’t take his burden from him, it will go back into his family and the cycle will continue.
So what I see in this song is a man who feels he cannot adapt to being an adult, and whose perceptions of the roles of adult and child are mixed up to begin with, who feels angry and broken and wants to forcefully fix what he perceives as the problem. He targets his dependence on others—he’s only going to ask himself questions, he’ll be dropping himself off from now on—and tries to discard everything that reminds him of his childhood, like his passed-down toys and his memories. His misguidedness leads to an endless cycle of child and man and child again, he never truly grows up.