Samuel Hoffenstein’s eight-line “I Had Three Friends in Gotham” works like a grim counting rhyme. It opens with a childlike pattern of parallel phrases—one friend dead, another palsied, a third doomed—yet the subject is adult ruin. The poem’s central idea is less that individual tragedies occur than that loss becomes a logic, an arithmetic that leaves the speaker counting the ways he has been abandoned.
The form is deliberately simple. Each quatrain follows a loose seven-six syllable pattern, and only the even-numbered lines rhyme: dead with bed, too with do. That ballad-like structure resembles a folk song or nursery rhyme, a form that usually promises comfort or moral clarity. Here it produces the opposite. In the first stanza, the second and fourth lines collapse death and domesticity into one blunt rhyme, dead and bed. The palsied friend “cannot leave his bed,” so the bed becomes not a place of rest but a kind of early grave. Meanwhile the unrhymed first and third lines leave “Gotham” and “palsy” hanging, unresolved.
The diction is plain to the point of coldness. The opening word had matters: the speaker does not say “I have three friends,” but already places friendship in the past. “Gotham,” an old nickname for New York, sounds more like a storybook setting than a real community—a place large enough for people to vanish into separate fates. The word palsy is clinical, unromantic, denying the sick friend any poetic dignity. Then the second stanza shifts into prophecy: “And now I know the other / Will soon desert me too.” That word desert is crucial. Dying and falling ill are treated not as suffering that calls for compassion, but as desertion—as if the friends have somehow left the speaker behind. That self-centered framing is part of the poem’s dark comedy, but it also exposes real loneliness.
The third friend’s fate is the most disturbing because it has not happened yet. He will “end his days in Sing Sing, / For something he will do.” The future crime is left blank. The speaker knows the prison but not the deed, or will not say what it is. Sing Sing is a real place, and its appearance jerks the poem out of nursery-rhyme vagueness into an institutional, adult world of punishment. The name itself repeats like an eerie chant, its doubled syllable mocking the cheerful repetition of a children’s song. The rhyme of too and do links the act of desertion directly to an unnamed future action, and the poem closes on “do,” leaving the reader in a state of suspended expectation. The friend is condemned before the fact—not by law, but by the speaker’s certainty.
The repeated openings—and one, and one, and now—turn the three friends into a sequence, a countdown rather than a fellowship. Three has a folk-tale fullness, but here it is emptied out. One friend is dead, one immobile, one fated for prison; not one remains present. The speaker is left alone, narrating with a detachment that feels both wry and defensive. That tension gives the poem its uncomfortable power. It is an anti-elegy: no tribute, no consolation, just a flat statement of loss delivered in a sing-song rhythm. Hoffenstein turns grief into a dark joke, but the joke is grimly precise. To be left counting the dead, the sick, and the doomed is to discover that friendship, in this city, may only be a series of goodbyes.