Samuel Hoffenstein’s “The Gnu” sounds at first like a nonsense rhyme for children: eight short lines about an animal whose name invites comic stretching. But beneath the joke lies a sharp philosophical turn. The speaker begins by calling the gnu “remark-a-bul,” a spelling split across a hyphen so that it can sit beside “ani-mul,” yet the poem quickly reverses direction. If a gnu seems odd to human eyes, the speaker suggests, then human beings must seem just as odd to the gnu. The central idea is not really about zoology at all; it is about the relativity of strangeness. What counts as peculiar depends on who is doing the looking.
The construction is as tidy as the argument is playful. Four couplets carry the poem forward, and most lines skip along with four stresses, which gives the verse a nursery-rhyme lilt. The first rhyme is deliberately forced: “remark-a-bul” and “ani-mul” do not quite match as ordinary spellings, but the hyphens bend the words until they almost rhyme. That comic distortion is part of the poem’s method. Language itself has to become a little peculiar in order to describe a creature thought to be peculiar. The following rhymes—you/gnu, I/eye, us/hippopotamus—are cleaner, but the logic grows more absurd, as if neatness of form is being used to frame a ridiculous conclusion.
The poem’s imagery is deliberately thin, yet the one physical detail matters greatly. The speaker imagines the gnu’s “peculiar eye” watching him back. That phrase turns the animal from an object of description into an observer with a point of view. The word “remark-a-bul” appears again in line three, but now the speaker applies it to “you,” the reader or any human onlooker: “Yet how remark-a-bul must you / Appear to the eccentric gnu!” The reversal is quick and complete. The human, who began as the one observing, becomes the thing being stared at. Words such as “eccentric” and “peculiar” float free of their usual target; they now attach just as easily to the poet and the audience as to the animal. The opening line also quietly admits that the speaker’s judgement is second-hand—“from all descriptions”—so even the claim of the gnu’s oddness rests on someone else’s report. That small detail makes the poem’s confidence wobble in a useful way.
The final couplet turns this personal confusion into a shared condition. “There’s something wrong with all of us;— / Let’s ask the hippopotamus.” The pause marked by the semicolon and dash allows the speaker to shift from recognition to mock solution. The hippopotamus, another creature often treated as clumsy and strange, is offered as a kind of wise judge, but the joke is that no animal has a privileged view. Asking the hippopotamus would only add one more peculiar perspective. What makes Hoffenstein’s poem significant is its ability to use light verse for a humbling reminder. The position of “normal” is never neutral; it always belongs to somebody. We are all, to some other set of eyes, the remarkable ones, and that is not a fault to be solved but a fact to be laughed at and accepted.