Eleven words are enough for hans to stage a small social comedy. He likes her, she likes him, and every onlooker can see it, every onlooker except the two people at the centre. The central idea is a gentle paradox: the closer a feeling is to you, the harder it can be to see, while bystanders read it at a glance. Being inside a feeling is a kind of blindness.
The construction is more careful than the plain surface suggests. The first two lines are mirror images: "He likes her, / She likes him too." The pronouns swap places, so the grammar itself shows two people facing each other. Yet they sit on separate lines, with a gap of white space between them, and the whole problem seems to live in that gap. The two feel the same thing but never share a line. The verb matters too. It is "likes", not "loves", so the feeling is shy and low-volume, the kind that might be denied if anyone asked. The little word "too" carries the poem's only confirmation that the feeling is returned. It arrives almost as an afterthought, like a note passed along a corridor.
Follow the pronouns and you can see the poem's movement. Lines one and two name individuals. Line three opens out to "Everyone", a crowd. Line four narrows back to "them". It is like a camera pulling back to show the whole room, then settling on the two faces that don't know they are being watched. There is irony in that last word. "Them" is a plural, the first and only moment the two people are grammatically joined. The poem pairs them up in the same breath that it shuts them out.
The sound is just as deliberate. The lines run three syllables, four, four, three, a symmetrical frame with the rhythm of a murmured piece of gossip. There is no end rhyme: "her", "too", "knows" and "them" never chime, which suits a poem about things that fail to connect. A quieter echo does exist, though. "Him" in line two and "them" in line four share their sound, as if the language already knows these two belong together. The punctuation helps. Commas close each of the first three lines, so the thought keeps running on, breathless, the way a rumour does, and the only full stop waits at the very end. Then "Except them" puts two stressed syllables side by side, ex-CEPT THEM, and the poem lands with a flat, almost shrugging thud.
The title, "except them", repeats those last two words, so the punchline is given away before line one. This is a clever choice. We are made part of the "everyone" before we start reading, and the poem becomes less about suspense than about the position of knowing. Like the crowd, we watch with a mix of amusement, tenderness and perhaps some impatience. The ending is also open. What exactly don't they know? That the other person feels the same? Or that the entire neighbourhood is talking about it? The poem doesn't say, and both readings are funny and a little sad.
Nothing is given about the people involved, not even names, and that is part of the point. The only name attached to the poem is the author's, "hans", and its two characters stay as anonymous as "he" and "she". The situation could belong to two classmates, two colleagues, or the reader.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It has the shape of a joke, with a set-up, a repeat and a twist, but it leaves something truer than a punchline. Other people's feelings are easy to read, and our own are not.