Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe. Four be the things I'd been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt. Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne. Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

In a mock-nursery-rhyme cadence, Parker inventories “things” in numbered lists, mixing the lofty (wisdom, love, hope) with the petty or bodily (freckles) and the barbed (a foe, a sock in the eye). The humor comes from anticlimax and self-laceration: what one “learns” includes sorrow and enemies; what one would prefer to lack includes love and curiosity—traits usually praised. The final turn (“Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye”) captures Parker’s signature worldview: resilience and wit persist, but so do life’s humiliations. The poem reads as a compressed autobiography of modern disillusion—comic, rhythmic, and unsentimental—where survival is measured by the ability to laugh while expecting the next blow.