Samuel Hoffenstein’s “Songs of Faith in the Year After Next XIV” reads like a tiny, impious psalm. Its argument is disguised as praise: God has worked with such care that even the toad, the gnu, the crab, the camel, and the cow are masterpieces, and the same lavish attention has fallen on priests and presidents. The central joke is a leveling one. Divine craftsmanship appears not as proof of human dignity but as a comic equalizer, placing warty, lumpy, awkward creatures on the same creative plane as the men who claim moral or political authority.
The poem is a single sentence arranged in four rhyming couplets. The short lines and quick rhymes give it the momentum of a nursery rhyme or a hymn, and the couplets tend to snap shut with a neat click—until the last pair, where “spent” and “president” produce a deliberately off-kilter near rhyme that sharpens the satirical point. The syntax also does important work. The main clause is delayed while the “care,” “craftsmanship,” and “thought” pile up, so the reader moves through three increasingly strange examples before the final couplet delivers the punchline. By the time the poem returns to the human world, the deflation feels almost inevitable.
The imagery elevates the lowly through the language of fine workmanship. “Lapidary care” belongs to the art of cutting gemstones, so to say God bestowed it “in fashioning the toad” is both grand and absurd: a jeweler’s precision spent on a warty amphibian. The same comic inflation appears in “expert craftsmanship” and “the gnu’s topography,” as if God were not merely making an animal but surveying an entire landscape of humps, horns, and hide. “Topography” is a witty choice because it turns a living body into terrain, making the gnu’s odd shape sound geographical rather than anatomical. Then the poem turns to the “thought which loosened from that Brow”—the capitalized Brow hinting at a divine mind—and the thought spills out as “The crab, the camel and the cow.” The hard c sounds of the animal names seem almost improvised, a line of ungainly creatures that nonetheless appear as deliberate work.
The final couplet completes the satire. “With equal lavishness He spent / On many a priest and president.” “Lavishness” carries a double charge: it suggests generosity but also excess, perhaps even waste. The word “equal” is the poem’s sharpest blade. If God’s attention was equally lavish for a toad, a gnu, a crab, a camel, and a cow, then priests and presidents have no special place in creation. They are simply more items in the same odd collection. The pairing of “priest and president” links two kinds of authority—spiritual and political—and “many a” suggests that such figures are numerous and interchangeable rather than uniquely chosen. The poem does not deny God’s existence or skill; it denies that human rank reflects any superior design.
What makes the poem significant is how economically it punctures human vanity. In eight lines, it uses the conventions of a hymn to mock the assumption that the world was made for powerful people. The title’s “faith” is therefore ironic, or at least unresolved: a faith deferred to “the year after next” is a faith kept comfortably at a distance. The real target is not God’s taste but human self-importance. If the toad and the gnu deserved divine craftsmanship, then the priest and the president deserve no more—and no less.