Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Hoffenstein

Needling honesty dressed up as a valentine, Hoffenstein’s couplet turns romance into a closed loop of dissatisfaction. The opening half is pure lover’s complaint: absence makes the heart gnaw at itself, and the piling up of adjectives ("restless, lonely, / Wretched, bored, dejected") mimics the way misery snowballs when you have too much time to think. It’s comic because it’s excessive; it’s also revealing because the speaker can’t even choose the most flattering kind of pain. "Bored" is the tell - less tragic than petty, the kind of word that punctures romantic solemnity.

Then comes the pivot, and Hoffenstein announces it like a vaudeville magician: "only here's the rub". That phrase is the trapdoor. In two beats, the poem confesses the unconfessable: the beloved isn’t the cure, she’s just another setting for the same internal weather. The punchline ("I feel the same when you're near") doesn’t merely negate the first complaint; it exposes it as a pretext. The speaker isn’t suffering from separation, he’s suffering from himself.

Context matters: Hoffenstein wrote in an era steeped in urbane magazine wit, Broadway patter, and modernist disillusionment. Sentimentality was still saleable, but cynicism was becoming a style. This line sits right at that cultural seam, spoofing the language of devotion while sketching a darker psychology: attachment as habit, romance as performance, intimacy as another room you can’t sleep in. The joke lands because it’s cruel, and it’s cruel because it’s plausible.