Four lines are enough for Samuel Hoffenstein to stage a small comic tragedy of ambition and limitation. A parrot “does the best he can / To imitate the talk of Man,” yet the effort collapses into the final blunt word: “screech.” The apparent joke is simple, but it quietly asks what speech really is. The central idea is that spoken language is not a trick of sound; it is a gift. Without that gift, imitation cannot cross into meaning. The bird is not lazy or foolish — the phrase “does the best he can” grants it genuine effort — but effort alone cannot turn a copy into speech.
The construction makes the failure feel both inevitable and oddly sympathetic. The four lines move as one continuous sentence, and the pivot comes with “But since he has no gift for speech,” which explains the limit before the final line delivers the result. The meter is regular iambic tetrameter, a steady four-beat line that sounds almost like a nursery rhyme. Each couplet rhymes: “can” with “Man,” then “speech” with “screech.” The first rhyme places the bird’s ability next to the grand category of “Man,” and the second rhyme drops from the abstract noun “speech” into the harsh sonic blow of “screech.” That final word is onomatopoeic; it enacts the noise instead of merely naming it. The word “screech” also has a hard, closed sound after the softer vowel of “speech,” so the poem’s neat rhyme suddenly exposes a gap between polished human language and raw bird sound.
Key words do much of the work. “Man” is capitalized, turning one species into an elevated standard; it is not just people talking but “the talk of Man,” a whole form of articulate life. The parrot is not named as a character but as a type, “the parrot” and later “the bird,” which makes him stand for every imitator. The contrast between “talk” and “speech” matters. “Talk” is the outward, social chatter the parrot hears and can copy in part. “Speech” is the deeper capacity the bird lacks. Calling it a “gift” is crucial: the poem does not say the parrot failed to practice, nor that it is stupid. The word “gift” suggests an endowment that cannot be earned. That is why the ending is not cruel. The bird’s best is simply not enough, and the poem treats this as a natural boundary rather than a moral failing.
The poem also derives force from its symmetry. The first and last lines mirror each other: “does the best he can” becomes “the best the bird can do.” The repetition closes the poem neatly, but the repeated superlative is ironic because the “best” is only a screech. What begins as praise of effort ends as a comic definition of limitation. The sentence structure keeps the reader slightly suspended across the four lines, with the main clause resolving only at the end. The poem’s brevity is its argument: it does not need more lines because the whole problem is already complete in one tiny action.
That may be why the poem feels more significant than its size suggests. It works as comic verse, but it is also a compressed allegory about imitation. The parrot could be any learner or artist who copies the surface of an admired model without yet possessing the inner faculty that makes the model alive. At the same time, the poem preserves a quiet dignity for the bird. A screech is not human talk, but it is honestly a bird’s voice. The poem lets the parrot fail without humiliation, and in doing so it draws a clear line between mimicry and true expression.