Mountain tops and traffic cops make an odd pair in the thirty-fourth of Samuel Hoffenstein’s *Songs About Life and Brighter Things Yet*, and their collision is exactly the point. The speaker looks back at youthful hopes not as plans or promises but as unruly little acrobats that climbed, danced, mocked, and made noise. The central idea is quietly double-edged: such hope is not wise or virtuous, yet its value lies in the fact that it lived fully and joyfully for a season. The speaker now stands past that season and feels no bitterness, only an amused gratitude.
The opening couplet gives the poem its comic logic. “When I was young, my hopes ran high” sounds like a sentimental cliché, but the next line—“My hopes did run, and so could I”—literalizes it. Hope’s running and the speaker’s running become the same physical fact, so aspiration is tied to the body. That is why the later word “thyroid” feels less like a joke than a completion of the poem’s hidden argument: youthful hope was never purely spiritual; it was part of a young body’s surplus of energy.
The poem’s shape supports that amusement. Seven couplets in four-beat lines bounce along with a nursery-rhyme gait, and the rhymes keep tipping from sublime to ridiculous: “mountain tops” meets “traffic cops,” the “Pleiades” are partnered with “trees,” and the “grave” arrives just after a “wave.” That patter turns each image into a comic hop. Though the poem has fourteen lines, it avoids the sonnet’s usual gravity; its shorter couplets sound more like a skipping rhyme than a meditation. The first twelve lines unroll as one long chain of what hopes did, their clauses linked by semicolons, until the turn at the word “Well,” where the speaker finally steps into the present tense.
The grammar of that long first movement is telling: “hopes” remain the subject of nearly every verb, so the speaker stays offstage, watching his younger self as a spectacle. And what a spectacle it is. The hopes dance on mountain tops, but they are “oblivious of the traffic cops”—a phrase that drops civic regulation into romantic landscape and implies that youthful hope does not even notice the rules it breaks. They swing “like monkeys in the trees / From sun and moon and Pleiades,” so the solar system becomes a jungle gym, and the sublime turns playful. The phrase “farthest wave” suggests risk and distance, yet these hopes “frolicked” there and “thumbed their noses at the grave,” answering mortality with a schoolyard gesture. The noise of that defiance matters too: they “thumbed their haughty bugles long / At men and creeds and right and wrong,” targeting the great abstractions of adult seriousness. Even the future is on the receiving end of the joke, described as “tin-horn days to come”—cheap and brassy—to which hope gave “their only sound of fife and drum.” There is a dry suggestion here: later life may be tinny, but hope’s loud parade is the music it remembers.
The last couplet performs a deliberate deflation. The word “thyroid” jars against the cosmic imagery that came before it; youth is not only “the Pleiades” but also a gland. “Well, now my thyroid youth is done” is both clinical and comic, and it prevents the poem from becoming a solemn elegy. The final line—“I’m very glad my hopes had fun!”—is plain, affectionate, and almost childlike. The speaker does not ask whether the hopes were true, fulfilled, or well-behaved. They had fun, and that is enough. That refusal of moralizing is what makes the poem significant. It treats hope as a burst of energy rather than a doctrine, and it allows the older speaker to laugh at his younger self without despising him. The poem’s wordplay and rollicking rhymes are not decoration; they recreate the very recklessness they describe, giving the reader a small dose of that glad, lawless vitality.