Samuel Hoffenstein’s “Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing XII” is a mock eulogy for someone who has not yet arrived. The “you” it addresses is air and water, nobody’s son or daughter, still in the prenatal state. The speaker lavishes compliments on this unperson for being harmless, quiet, honest and upright. But the joke is that every virtue on the list depends on not existing. You cannot drink or play the horses if you are not alive; you cannot indulge in a mood or interfere with natural forces if you have no body, no will and no place in the world. The central idea is quietly corrosive: the ideal of perfect goodness, pushed far enough, turns out to be a description of nothing.
The poem builds that joke through bouncy rhymed couplets, mostly end-stopped, each pair arriving like a small comic verdict. The metre is loose and conversational, but the rhymes keep it moving with a singsong confidence. Some rhymes are deliberately absurd: “pre-natal” is paired with “seldom fatal,” turning a condition of non-being into a medical reassurance. “Erratic” chimes with “static,” as if mood swings and poor radio reception were equal offences against the universe. This neat, almost nursery-rhyme form gives the satire its edge: the speaker sounds like a cheerful moralist handing out prizes for behaviour that is only possible before birth.
The imagery mixes the ancient and the modern, the cosmic and the trivial. The addressee is a “pure spirit,” then “air and water,” then a “harmless atom” content to stay in its own “stratum.” That word “stratum” does double work, suggesting both a geological layer and a social rank; the unborn is praised for knowing its place and never rising above it. The list of non-crimes shrinks from drinking and gambling to “moods or whims erratic, / Which cause the flu, and sometimes, static.” There is a mock logic here: if you never exist, you can be blamed for neither disease nor bad reception. Virtue becomes a series of negatives—no drinking, no betting, no moods, no interference—until goodness is little more than absence.
The Latin phrase “homo non est” is the poem’s intellectual punchline. It means something like “the man who is not,” and the speaker calls this unborn being a perfect type of it. The phrase is a joke about grammar and identity: the only perfect man is a non-man. Even the apparently positive compliments are undercut. To be “as upright as an ear of corn” sounds virtuous, but an ear of corn is upright only because it is rooted, passive and mindless. It is honest because it cannot speak, kind because it cannot act, unobtrusive because it is not there.
That is why the final line stings. After all this praise, the speaker asks: “And what thanks do you get for it all? You’re born!” The dash after “corn” holds the compliment in the air for a second, and then the punch lands. Birth is offered as a reward, but it is really the end of all this perfection. To be born is to acquire parents, body, habits, moods, interference, the flu and static—everything the poem has just praised the child for avoiding. What makes the poem significant is that it turns the language of moral praise inside out. It suggests that the qualities we often call good—quietness, harmlessness, staying out of trouble—may really be qualities of not living. Hoffenstein’s light verse is therefore not just a clever nursery rhyme for grown-ups; it is a sharp little essay on the difference between being blameless and being alive.