Samuel Hoffenstein’s four-line epigram sets one mystery against a very confident dismissal. It opens by likening “a woman” to the “touted Sphinx,” an image that carries the weight of ancient riddle and public reputation. Straight away the poem is dealing not with an ordinary person but with a figure already advertised as unreadable. The second line presses the mystery further: “Sits, and God knows what she thinks.” That phrase at first sounds like a shrug — heaven knows — but it also gives the woman a mind that is genuinely hidden, known only to God. Then the third and fourth lines introduce a counter-voice: “Hard-boiled men, who never fall, / Say she doesn’t think at all.” The epigram’s energy comes from the clash between those two positions. One side treats her as too deep to read; the other treats her as having no depth to read.
The form works like a joke with a punchline. The rhyme scheme is AABB, so the first two lines pair Sphinx and thinks, binding the image of the mysterious figure to the idea of an active inner life. The second pair couples fall and all, so the hard-boiled verdict lands with the finality of a closed door. The word fall is carefully poised: hard-boiled men “never fall,” meaning they do not fall in love, or do not let themselves be fooled. Their immunity is also their limit. The verb say in the last line is crucial. The poem does not report that the men know she doesn’t think; it reports that they say it. Their certainty is a claim, not a truth. By keeping the woman silent and absent from the argument, the poem lets those words hang as a display of male bravado.
The rhythm is quick and conversational. The first line has a slight stateliness because of the Sphinx reference, while the next three are shorter, especially the final verdict, which drops into plain speech: “Say she doesn’t think at all.” That colloquial flatness is part of the poem’s comic timing. It gives the hard-boiled men the sound of people who think they are being realistic when they are merely missing the point.
The adjective touted is a sly choice. An actual sphinx does not need advertising; calling it “touted” hints that its mystery is partly a story people tell, a reputation as much as a fact. That fits the poem’s view of romantic talk: the woman’s inscrutability is partly an image imposed on her. Meanwhile, “hard-boiled” belongs to a different register — tough, worldly, unsentimental. These are men who pride themselves on seeing through illusions. Yet the one thing they cannot see is the possibility of a mind unlike their own. Their brusque line, “Say she doesn’t think at all,” is written in deliberately flat, almost childish language, which makes the confidence sound less like wisdom than like a refusal to be curious.
The heading “Love-songs, at Once Tender and Informative” adds another layer of irony. A love song is expected to reveal feeling; this one “informs” its readers that certain men dismiss women’s inner lives altogether. The tenderness is displaced onto the poem’s wit, and the information is not really about the woman at all — it is about the posture of the hard-boiled man. The title also suggests that this is one of a sequence, so the joke is part of a larger playful anatomy of love, rather than a standalone proverb.
What makes the poem significant is its compression. In four lines it catches two opposite ways of avoiding a woman as a person: either turn her into a legendary riddle or declare her empty. The woman herself never speaks; she sits, and the poem refuses to solve her. Whatever she thinks remains outside the reach of the male voices, and outside the reach of the reader. The poem’s satirical point is that the hard-boiled man, for all his worldly confidence, has simply replaced one fantasy with another — mystery with blankness — and neither has much to do with the woman in front of him.