Ogden Nash - Salem Press

Critical Survey of Poetry Nash, Ogden
an apt characterization of the writing. The speaker is
Nash himself, an office worker on Madison Avenue
whose mind wanders during a bout of spring fever. There
is no real point to the wandering, which takes him from
Missouri to Massachusetts and from his chiropodist to
John the Baptist, who becomes the “Bobodist.” There is
only the vague wish for freedom, symbolized by the
“wings of a bird.” By the illogic of rhyme, the “bird” can
take the speaker to Second Avenue and even to “Third.”
“More About People”
Nash began writing for publication when the United
States was entering the Great Depression. Although he
wrote for a magazine that targeted New York’s affluent
social set, he became increasingly aware of the gap between
the rich and the poor. A contribution from 1930,
“More About People,” shows his awareness that “work
is wonderful medicine” for anyone in danger of starvation.
Seeking a rhyme for “medicine,” he runs through a
list of employers, “Firestone and Ford and Edison,” using
the well-known names to evoke successful people.
Nevertheless, he sides with the employed rather than
with the employers. The poem continues through eight
couplets, ending with “a nasty quirk”: “if you don’t want
to work you have to work to earn enough money so that
you won’t have to work.”
“A Necessary Dirge”
Nash loved to play the curmudgeon and could rail
about everything from billboards to parsnips, but he was
always able to put life in perspective. “A Necessary
Dirge” (1935) is a reflection on the perversity of “man’s
fate” in ten rhyming couplets. For example, “How easy
for those who do not bulge/ Not to indulge.” Nash combines
the universal and the particular, the Lexington Avenue
express subway train and the hero’s quest. He
would like to raise the big question of theodicy: He
would like to ask God why there is suffering in the
world. Yet he accepts his fate, “to be irked,” and advises
readers to take the “irking with insouciant urbanity.” Humorous
poetry can also be wise, as this poem shows.
“Ask Daddy, He Won’t Know”
As his family grew, Nash’s poems extended to all aspects
of domestic life. Looking forward to the rituals of
homework in a 1942 poem, “Ask Daddy, He Won’t
Know,” the speaker dreads the impending discovery that
yesterday’s genius—the boy whose “scholarship was fa-
mous”—will become tomorrow’s “ignoramus,” unable
to answer questions about geometry and geography. The
speaker is proud of his children but admits that he is
“overwhelmed by their erudite banter.” Of course, the
poem is ironic; Nash commands all sorts of random information,
even if it tends to stay “just back of the tip of
my tongue.” The real ignoramuses, by implication, are
the young who assume that he knows nothing, and not
just Nash’s young. “Try to explain that to your young,”
he says to the reader.
Versus
Nash’s first volume of poetry after World War II was
full of paradoxes. Its very title suggests that the poet is
adversarial in nature, going against the prosaic order of
things. His verses on subjects from bridge to birthday
cake are also statements “versus” unthinking acceptance
of things as they are. He is well aware of his poetic tradition;
he knows that William Wordsworth said, “The
Child is father of the Man” (in “My Heart Leaps Up,”
1802); however, he knows enough about children that he
would like to add, “But not for quite a while.” His poem
on the subject, titled “Lines to Be Embroidered on a
Bib,” employs the verse form known as the clerihew; it
takes the names of famous writers and thinkers and
makes rhymes with them with the sort of witty precision
that W. H. Auden would master.
Nash jokes about the squabbles between a big dog
and a little dog in a poem whose title, “Two Dogs Have
I,” alludes to Sonnet 144 of William Shakespeare. The
dust-jacket blurb notes that British readers had found the
philosophical side of Nash that Americans often miss,
and it quotes The Times of London on the “Democritean
streak which entitles him to the respect due to a philosopher,
albeit a laughing one.” Indeed, much as the ancient
Greek philosopher Democritus opined on the full and
the void, Nash turns the old adage “Nature abhors a vacuum”
into a personal reflection on the housing crisis in
“Nature Abhors a Vacancy.” No matter if one misses the
occasional allusion: There are gags for all.
There’s Always Another Windmill
Amid the postwar optimism, Nash found much to
grumble about but few publishers who wanted his
grumblings. He turned to lighter subjects, like animals,
and to familiar verse forms like the limerick. When he
took on unpopular causes, he adapted a quixotic tone,
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