than the syllable before it, producing a ‘‘one-
TWO, one-TWO’’ rhythm. Each line is composed
of four iambs, which means that there are a total
of eight syllables per line; poems in which the
rhythmic pattern is repeated four times per line
are intetrameter. The only place this pattern
seems to weaken is in the first foot of the fifth
line, where readers would stress the first and
second words alike. The well-calculated effect of
this is both to slow the reading of the poem, as is
appropriate for a juncture at which the poet is
seeking to establish a sort of sentimental reassess-
ment, and to place additional emphasis on the
repeated wordpeace. In all other cases, the iam-
bic tetrameter pattern presents itself quite clearly.
Historical Context
The Great Depression and
Interest in the Exotic
‘‘The Hippopotamus’’ was published in 1938, at a
time in U.S. history when much of the world still
seemed exotic and strange. Travel was far more
limited than it is today, and media were limited to
print, radio, and motion pictures. While the peo-
ple for whom Nash was writing would probably
have heard of a hippopotamus and might have
seen a picture of one, it is also likely that most
Americans, except those living near an urban
area with a zoo, would never have seen an actual
hippopotamus with their own eyes.
By 1938, the Great Depression, which is
considered to have started with the ‘‘Black Tues-
day’’ crash of the stock market on October 29,
1929, had been going on for almost a decade.
The worst of it came in the early 1930s, when
poor economic conditions were exacerbated
by a drought across the middle of the country,
ruining the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands
of families that relied on agriculture for their
basic subsistence. Between 1933 and 1934, a quar-
ter of employable Americans could not find work,
while another 25 percent of those who were work-
ing held onto their jobs with extended work hours
and reduced wages. These conditions eased in the
following years, as the government spent more
and more money hiring the unemployed as part
of the New Deal series of programs.
The difficult economic times meant that
most Americans were focused on sustenance,
not travel. Many had not been out of their own
town or county, and the vast majority certainly
did not have the means to travel across the world.
Nonetheless, the average American citizen would
have been familiar with what a hippopotamus
looked like. Photojournalism magazines such as
National Geographic(established in 1888),Life
(established in 1936) andLook(established in
1937), along with dozens of others, sent photog-
raphers around the world to seek out images that
citizens of the United States would find exotic and
captivating. Although television existed, it was
not in widespread use until the late 1940s; motion
pictures, however, were a popular form of enter-
tainment, and many movies were set in foreign
locations specifically to cater to audiences’ curi-
osity about the world beyond their own existence.
Hollywood offered fictional versions of foreign
cultures in such films as 1933’sKing Kongand the
popular Tarzan series of the 1930s.Isolationism and World War II
By 1938, the United States found itself being
pulled into the international scene. In Europe,
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, which was elected to
power in 1933, was expanding beyond its bor-
ders. When Germany invaded the Rhineland in
1936, the question of American involvement in
foreign affairs became one of the country’s great
political controversies. For the next five years,
the voices of those who felt that involvement in
world affairs was inevitable were outnumbered
by those who felt that the country had enough
troubles within its own borders, without joining
fights in other lands. With each act of aggression
by Hitler’s Germany, Benito Mussolini’s Italy,
and Imperial Japan, the case for international
involvement became harder to refute.
American isolationism was quickly discarded
after the Japanese attack on the American mili-
tary base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December
7, 1941. Millions of Americans enlisted to fight
overseas within weeks of the attacks, as followed
by millions more in the years to come, and
were disbursed around the globe. Most went to
Europe or to the Pacific, but many were sent to
battlefronts in Africa and throughout Asia. In all,
the four years of U.S. involvement in World War
II represented the largest movement of Americans
around the globe in history. Few of these soldiers
traveled to the hippopotamus’s native land of
sub-Saharan Africa, which was not a theater of
war, but America’s abrupt splash into interna-
tional involvement matches the poem’s reflections
on self-involvement.The Hippopotamus