Twenty words, most of them plain and short, and still the poem leaves a reader unsure whether to nod or flinch. Its title promises a proverb, and the first stanza sounds like one: a general truth, calmly stated, with the tidy shape of "X in Y is Z." But the wisdom on offer is slippery. "A chin of good cheer / in a famine / is the greatest extremity." Is cheerfulness during hunger admirable, the highest form of courage? Or is it grotesque, the most extreme thing a person could do, a kind of obliviousness? The poem never says, and that refusal is where its life lies.
The oddest phrase is the first, "a chin of good cheer." English has the toast, the cup of good cheer, and it has the instruction to keep your chin up. The poem fuses them, and the cup quietly disappears. In a famine there is no cup to raise, so what remains is the chin, a bare part of the body held up as if it were the offering. The substitution is funny, but the humor is thin and uneasy, because it shows how little is left to hold up. The hard *ch* sounds of "chin" and "cheer" bump together so closely that the cheerfulness feels clenched rather than relaxed, a jaw set against hardship.
Then comes "extremity," which carries a pun that is easy to miss. An extremity is a desperate situation, the edge of what a person can bear. It is also, in anatomy, a far end of the body, such as a hand, a foot, or a fingertip. A chin is the lower limit of the face, so the poem plays on the literal and the figurative at once. The cheer is the extremity because it sticks out at the furthest edge of the situation, and because it marks the point beyond which things cannot go. The word is also the longest in the poem, and the final line, "is the greatest extremity," stretches out after two short lines. Its pace changes too. The short opening lines each have only two or three stresses, while the last runs on in a long tumble of unstressed syllables, as though the sentence itself were going to its limit.
The second stanza seems to change the subject: "Some part of this day / is another." There is no rhyme anywhere in the poem, and no regular meter, so the poem has little to bind its two halves except the white space between them and our urge to link them. The line break after "this day" gives us a complete thought, a day with a part in it, before "is another" overturns it. What is another? The most natural reading is another day, so that no day is sealed off from the others. Today's famine would then contain a piece of some other day, an earlier plenty or a later relief, and the cheer in the first stanza might be that piece showing through. A darker reading is also possible. If part of today is already tomorrow's hunger, or yesterday's, then the famine never really ends. "Another" might even mean another person, so that the day is shared and nobody's suffering is entirely their own. The word is left open, and the sentence is built from small, blunt words that give a reader nothing to hold except the oddness of the claim.
The title offers one more clue. The "(11)" suggests the poem belongs to a numbered series, which is an inference from the title and not something the poem tells us. Read that way, it is one proverb among several, a fragment of invented folk wisdom whose authority comes from sounding old while meaning something unsettled. Proverbs usually close an argument. This one reopens it.
That is the poem's significance. In a few lines it takes a familiar, comforting form and presses on it until the comfort gives way, leaving a question about whether good cheer in dire times is courage, denial, or something stranger. The second stanza adds the possibility that time is less divided than we think. Because the poem is so short and its meaning so unfixed, each reader has to decide how much of that cheer to believe.