Samuel Hoffenstein’s tiny poem might look like a joke, but its joke contains a small moral argument. The speaker begins by offering respect to “that noble man / Who, when he’s full of trouble can / Preserve a bright and cheerful mien / As if his life were all serene.” The key phrase is “as if.” The stoic figure is admirable, but the poem hints that his serenity is a performance, a face maintained for the world rather than a feeling arising from the world. The word “mien” is deliberately formal, even slightly stiff, matching the controlled expression it describes.
Then the poem swerves. With the casual “But I prefer,” the speaker sets aside moral approval for something more personal and physical: “the fellow, who / Is lively as a kangaroo / And beams and shouts with pure delight / When everything is going right.” The kangaroo is the poem’s comic masterstroke. After the polished vocabulary of “noble,” “mien,” and “serene,” this bouncing animal breaks in with impossible energy. It is not a symbol of dignity; it suggests springy, unrestrained movement. Where the first man preserves his cheer, the second simply has it. The verbs “beams and shouts” are outward and noisy, not composed. “Pure delight” is important because it is uncomplicated—there is no effort, no moral struggle, just pleasure in good fortune.
The construction sharpens this contrast. The poem is eight lines of iambic tetrameter, divided into two neat four-line sentences with the same basic AABB rhyme scheme. Both quatrains compare two human types, but they sound different. The first is filled with soft consonants and long vowels: “noble,” “trouble,” “cheerful,” “serene.” The second introduces the rollicking word “kangaroo,” whose three syllables bounce against the meter, and ends with the plain, almost childlike rhyme “delight / right.” The rhyme itself makes a case: joy belongs to the moment when things go “right,” not to a forced serenity when they do not.
This balance between respect and preference is the poem’s central idea. It does not mock the noble man; the speaker says “I do respect” him, and the line sounds genuine. But respect is a formal, distant emotion. Preference is warmer. Hoffenstein gently suggests that we may overpraise endurance and underrate cheerfulness. There is something slightly suspicious about a person who looks serene in trouble, because we cannot tell whether the calm is real or a social mask. The kangaroo-fellow, by contrast, has no mask. His happiness is exactly matched to his circumstances: when everything is going right, he shows it.
That final phrase matters too. “Everything is going right” is deliberately colloquial after the elevated language earlier. It refuses to make happiness profound or philosophical. The poem finds significance in the ordinary good moments—the days without catastrophe—and asks why we should not celebrate them loudly. The title’s mention of “brighter things” reinforces this small optimism: the poem chooses the person who lights up when the world does.
Read as part of a numbered sequence, the piece has the feel of a witty aside, a truth captured between songs. Its significance lies in that compactness. In eight lines, Hoffenstein turns a common-sense observation into an elegant argument about emotional honesty: the noble sufferer may deserve our respect, but the cheerful kangaroo earns our affection. And the poem’s final bounce leaves the reader, like its preferred figure, leaning toward delight.