Samuel Hoffenstein’s little love song begins with a boast and ends with a confession. The boast is easy to hear in the first quatrain: the honey of the Hybla bees, famous since antiquity, cannot match the sweetness of kissing the beloved. The confession arrives in the final line, where the speaker admits that even when he possesses the kiss, he misses the ache of wanting it. In eight short lines, the poem turns a conventional love lyric inside out: the lover does not simply long for the beloved, he longs for longing itself.
The shape of the poem is as tidy as its argument is unsettling. Two quatrains move in steady iambic tetrameter, with simple alternating rhymes—bees/trees, kiss/miss—while the word “you” closes every even-numbered line. That repeated “you” acts like a musical phrase returning again and again, holding the speaker’s attention fixed on the beloved even as the thought twists. The first stanza works through simile: a sweetness from nature and an autumn melancholy are both outdone by what the speaker feels. “The honey of the Hybla bees” summons an old world of perfect sweetness, while “autumn wind in dying trees” brings the natural ache of decay. Placed side by side, the two images imply that love contains both fullness and loss before the second stanza has even spoken.
The second stanza sharpens into paradox. “And when you are not mine to kiss, / My every thought is haunting you”—absence fills the speaker’s mind so completely that his thoughts become ghostly, pursuing the beloved rather than simply resting on her. Then the poem’s most striking turn comes: “And when your mouth is mine, I miss / The wistfulness of wanting you.” The word “mine” should signal triumph, but the verb that follows is “miss.” Satisfaction does not end the love story; it introduces a quieter absence. Wanting, the speaker discovers, was not merely an obstacle to be overcome. It was one of the sweetest parts of the experience. “Wistfulness” in the first stanza had seemed a sad property of autumn; by the final line it has become something the lover regrets losing.
Hoffenstein’s word choices reinforce that fusion of sweetness and loss. The alliterative “honey” and “Hybla” sound rich and thick, while the w-sounds in “wind,” “wistful,” and “wanting” thread a soft melancholy through the poem. The rhyme of “kiss” with “miss” is more than convenient: it insists, in sound, that the two states belong together. Even the title’s promise to be “informative” is part of the joke and the seriousness. The poem does offer information, almost like a small theorem of the heart: wanting is not the opposite of having; it is the condition that gives having its meaning, and it does not disappear upon success.
That is what makes such a brief poem significant. Most love songs promise that fulfillment will end longing. Hoffenstein’s song admits that the longing may be the thing the lover cannot bear to lose. It is witty enough to feel light, yet clear-eyed enough to sound true: the lover is caught between the sweet mouth and the missing of the wanting, and the poem leaves him there, still turning on that repeated “you.”