Ogden Nash - Salem Press

Critical Survey of Poetry Nashe, Thomas
the longer work: man’s weakness in face of natural elements.
The refrain, repeated at the end of each of the two
stanzas, is “From winter, plague, & pestilence, good
Lord, deliver us.”
It was surely fear of the plague and of man’s frailty in
general that led Nashe to write the best of his lyrics,
“Song: Adieu, farewell earths blisse,” sung to the dying
Summer by Will Summer. Nashe recognizes in the
refrain which follows each of the six stanzas that he
is sick, he must die, and he prays: “Lord, have mercy
on us.”
In a logical development, Nashe first introduces
the theme of Everyman: “Fond are lifes lustful ioyes.”
In succeeding stanzas he develops each of the “lustfull
ioyes” in turn. “Rich men” are warned not to trust in
their wealth, “Beauty” is revealed as transitory,
“Strength” is pictured surrendering to the grave, and
“Wit” is useless to dissuade Hell’s executioner. In a very
specific, orderly manner and in spare iambic trimeter
lines, Nashe presents man’s death-lament and prayer for
mercy. One stanza will show the strength of the whole
poem:
Beauty is but a flowre,
Which wrinckles will deuoure,
Brightnesse falls from the ayre,
Queenes have died yong and faire,
Dust hath closed Helens eye.
I am sick, I must dye:
Lord, have mercy on vs.
The Choise of Valentines
Nashe’s last poem is by far his longest. The Choise of
Valentines is an erotic narrative poem in heroic couplets
running to more than three hundred lines. With the kind
of specificity that one would expect from the author of
The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe tells of the visit of the
young man Tomalin to a brothel in search of his valentine,
“gentle mistris Francis.” Tomalin’s detailed exploration
of the woman’s anatomical charms, his unexpected
loss of sexual potency, and her announced
preference for a dildo all combine to present an Ovidian
erotic-mythological poem of the type popular in Elizabethan
England. Nashe’s poem must, however, be set off
from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) and
Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598), which emphasize
the mythological more than the erotic. Nashe clearly
emphasizes the erotic, almost to the exclusion of the
mythological. Why not? he seems to say in the dedicatory
sonnet accompanying the poem: Ovid was his
guide, and “Ouids wanton Muse did not offend.”
Nowhere, with the exception of the excellent “Song:
Adieu, farewell earths blisse,” does Nashe rise to the
heights of his greatest contemporaries, Spenser, Sidney,
Marlowe, and Shakespeare. In that poem, in the sonnet
“Were there no warres,” and in perhaps one or two other
poems his Muse is sufficiently shaken into consciousness
by the poet’s interest in the subject. The remainder
of Nashe’s poetry is the work of an excellent craftsman
who is playing with form and language.
Other major works
long fiction: The Unfortunate Traveller: Or,
The Life of Jack Wilton, 1594 (prose and poetry).
plays: Dido, Queen of Carthage, pr. c. 1586-1587
(with Christopher Marlowe); Summer’s Last Will and
Testament, pr. 1592; The Isle of Dogs, pr. 1597 (with
Ben Jonson; no longer extant).
nonfiction: preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon,
1589; The Anatomie of Absurditie, 1589; An
Almond for a Parrat, 1590; preface to Sir Philip Sidney’s
Astrophel and Stella, 1591; Pierce Peniless,
His Supplication to the Divell, 1592 (prose and poetry);
preface to Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart
Courtier, 1592; Strange News of the Intercepting of
Certain Letters, 1592 (prose and poetry; also known
as The Four Letters Confuted); Christ’s Tears over
Jerusalem, 1593; The Terrors of the Night, 1594;
Have with You to Saffron-Walden, 1596; Nashe’s
Lenten Stuffe, 1599.
Bibliography
Helgerson, Richard. The Elizabethan Prodigals. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977. Nashe and
his colleagues Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd,
George Peele, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge,
all with university training, formed a group of literary
bohemians in London. Helgerson catalogs their
escapades and relates them to their lives, which were
adventurous, barbarous, and impoverished in turn.
The index cross-references topics well.
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