A ship, a list of far-off places, and a prayer for a destination: Hoffenstein’s compact lyric seems at first like a simple travel fantasy. The speaker announces, “I want to take a ship and go / Abroad, but where I do not know,” and then reels off the places that will not do: Paris, London, Rome, Nagasaki, Naples, Nome, Honolulu, Teheran, Servia or Afghanistan. The names tumble across the globe, from famous capitals to a remote Alaskan town, and the list’s very range makes the refusal stranger. If Paris, London, Rome, and Honolulu all fail, the problem cannot be a shortage of options; the problem is in the wanting itself.
The poem is built from rhyming couplets, which give it a jaunty, almost nursery-rhyme speed. Yet the rhymes are deliberately imperfect at moments: Rome and Nome are an odd pair, and Teheran and Afghanistan stretch to meet each other. That wobbly music matters. It lets the poem mock its own romantic longing even as it expresses it. The opening line has the swing of a sea shanty: “I want to take a ship and go.” But the second line interrupts the dream with a confession of ignorance: “but where I do not know.” The rhythm, mostly iambic tetrameter, keeps tripping over the place names, especially in the middle of the list, where “Nagasaki, Naples, Nome” and “Honolulu, Teheran” refuse to sit neatly in the metre. The effect is comic and a little restless, like a traveller pacing the deck without ever leaving port.
The poem’s key turn comes after the list. The speaker has already said where he does not want to go; then he reverts to the same desire in different words: “And yet I want to take a ship / And give the place I’m in the slip—.” The colloquial phrase “give the place I’m in the slip” is worth pausing over. To give someone the slip means to escape or throw someone off one’s trail, usually when fleeing something. Here the speaker wants to escape a “place,” but the language makes that place feel almost like a pursuer. It is not that a particular city or country has failed him; he wants to slip away from simply being where he is. Escape, not arrival, is the real fantasy.
That is why the final couplet is both funny and unexpectedly serious: “Lord, tell me where I want to go; / Give a man a decent show!” Usually a person prays to be shown the right path, but this speaker asks to be shown his own desire. He knows he wants to leave; he just does not know what he wants to leave for. The word “Lord” makes the poem a mock-prayer, but “Give a man a decent show” brings in the language of the theatre or fairground. The speaker is asking for a fair chance, a plausible destination, some visible reason for all this restlessness. The phrase “decent show” is deliberately unromantic; it undercuts the grand despair promised by the title. The title, after all, is “Songs of Fairly Utter Despair”—not quite utter, only fairly utter. The qualifier “fairly” is the key to the poem’s tone. It admits that the despair is real enough to write about, but not so grand that it cannot be laughed at.
The verb “want” appears three times in these short lines, and its object keeps dissolving: first he wants to take a ship, then he wants to give the place the slip, finally he wants to know where he wants to go. The desire is constant; the destination is not. What makes the poem significant is the way it pins down an ordinary, uneasy feeling: wanting to leave without knowing what one is looking for. The speaker rejects everywhere almost by reflex. Each place name is just a name, not a place with a reason attached. The poem does not offer a solution, and it does not pretend that a better destination exists. It leaves the speaker caught between desire and indecision, appealing to a Lord who may or may not supply a “decent show.” In ten short lines, Hoffenstein turns vagueness itself into the subject: the particular modern restlessness that knows it wants to go but cannot say where.