Faith & Spirit Quote by Samuel Hoffenstein

Gothic despair, meet the grocery list. Hoffenstein’s couplet swings a wrecking ball through romantic self-mythology by yoking “soul” to “diet” with a grin you can hear. The first clause performs high melodrama: “dark,” “stormy,” “riot” stacks weather, moral panic, and civic unrest into a single inner forecast. It’s the diction of poets who want their suffering to sound cosmic, not incidental. Then the second clause flips the lighting: “directly traced over to diet” is the language of diagnoses, not destinies. “Traced over” feels almost clerical, like an accountant reconciling a ledger. The poem doesn’t argue that feelings aren’t real; it argues they’re often less metaphysical than we’d like to believe.

The specific intent is deflation. Hoffenstein, a writer known for wit and parody, takes aim at the era’s appetite for grand, tortured interiority by offering a humiliatingly mundane cause. It’s a gag with teeth: modern life constantly invites us to narrate our moods as identity, ideology, even art, while ignoring the bodily basics. The subtext is anti-pretension, but also anti-alibi. If your “stormy riot” can be “directly” explained, then you’re not a tragic hero; you’re a creature with blood sugar.

Context matters: early 20th-century culture was full of competing authorities over the self - poets, psychoanalysts, diet reformers, doctors, advertisers. Hoffenstein neatly lampoons them all, compressing a whole modern anxiety into one elegant rhyme: maybe the abyss is real, but maybe it’s also indigestion.