Breathes there a man with hide so tough / Who says two sexes aren’t enough? The opening words summon a famous line from Sir Walter Scott’s *The Lay of the Last Minstrel*: “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead...” Hoffenstein keeps the trumpet-like phrasing but drains it of nation, sentiment, and moral seriousness. Instead of a man too dead in soul to love his country, there is a man with thick skin; instead of an avowal of native land, there is a shrug about the number of sexes. The poem consists of a single couplet, two lines that reuse the sound of grand rhetoric for a small sexual joke.
The construction is quietly exact. The first line marches in iambic tetrameter: *Breathes there a man with hide so tough*. The archaic “Breathes” gives the question a set-piece formality, while “hide” is deliberately odd for a person, pushing the figure toward leather and animal toughness. The line break after “tough” opens a space of expectation: toughness seems to promise endurance or courage. Then the second line fulfils the thought with the entire proposition: “Who says two sexes aren’t enough?” The rhyme *tough/enough* works as the engine of the joke. Both are short, blunt words; “enough” answers “tough” by turning heroic capacity into a question of quantity. The phrase “says two sexes” has a slight sibilant hiss, like a whispered provocation, and the closing “aren’t enough” lands with a shrug. Because the couplet is closed—no third line, no qualification—the reader is left holding the question like a challenge.
The central idea is not simply that someone wants more than two sexes. The force sits in the conditional “Breathes there a man.” The poem pretends to ask whether any man has a hide thick enough to say aloud what private desire might suggest: that two categories do not cover everything. Here “hide so tough” is not Scott’s moral failing, a “soul so dead”; it is the comic equipment a man would need to withstand embarrassment or laughter. Meanwhile, the title *Love-songs, at Once Tender and Informative III* adds to the satire. A love-song promises tenderness; an informative text promises facts. These two lines offer neither a beloved nor a fact, only a rhetorical question about appetite. The phrase “two sexes” is coldly biological rather than romantic, and “enough” treats sexual possibility as a countable thing. The poem mocks both the lover’s inflated language and the clinical language of information.
What makes it significant is its compression and its ear. In two lines it rewrites a recognizable piece of literary history, lowers it from national feeling to bodily complaint, and leaves the meaning slightly double. It can be heard as a rebellious hint that desire overflows the usual categories, or as a wink at masculine greed and comic dissatisfaction—because the man who announces that two sexes are not enough is also a figure of excess. That ambiguity is not a weakness. The couplet asks the reader to decide whether it is exposing a truth or mocking an attitude. As a lesson in parody, it shows how a small change in vocabulary and tone can flip a high-minded question into a joke while preserving the rhythm, grammar, and gravity of the original.