Ogden Nash 1902-1971
(This column was first published in the August 19, 2002 Buffalo News.)
Today we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Ogden Nash, arguably
the finest writer in history of brief comic verse. The poet died over thirty
years ago but his lines remain as fresh as this morning’s dew.
Happily, many of Nash’s poems are about nature and, like the very
best caricatures, they capture his delight in the subjects about which he
wrote. But nature or not, every one of his ditties speaks to the human
condition -- to us. Consider in this regard, for example, “The
Ant”:
The
ant has made himself illustrious
Through
constant industry industrious.
So
what?
Would
you be calm and placid
If
you were full of formic acid?
Or “The Centipede”:
I
objurgate the centipede,
A
bug we do not really need.
At
sleepy-time he beats a path
Straight
to the bedroom or the bath.
You
always wallop where he’s not,
Or,
if he is, he makes a spot.
In no way is the poet trying to introduce us to the
life history of the centipede. Rather, he is reviewing for us in a gently
twisted way, our usual interaction with the animal about which he writes. Here,
for example, he has captured a commonplace experience with this tiny denizen,
but he has described it in a way that none of us could match.
To me these little poems sparkle like gems. No haiku can improve upon
them. Some of them are still shorter, couplets or triplets. He writes of
“The Fly”:
The
Lord in his wisdom made the fly,
And
then forgot to tell us why.
But my favorites remain the quatrains:
Some
primal termite knocked on wood
And
tasted it, and found it good!
And
that is why your Cousin May
Fell
through the parlor floor today.
Not all of Ogden Nash’s nature-oriented poetry spoke of individual
species. In “The Purist”, he tells us about the conscientious
scientist, Professor Twist, who lost his wife in the jungle:
She
had, the guide informed him later,
Been
eaten by an alligator.
Professor
Twist could not but smile.
‘You
mean,’ he said, ‘a crocodile.’
The historical novelist Kenneth Roberts
once wrote a wonderful essay entitled “Roads of Remembrance.” In it
he made a powerful case against the signs littering the New England roads that
follow the lines of march of our nation’s early military campaigns. In
the four simple lines of his poem, “Song of the Open Road,” Nash
conveys the same message almost as strongly:
I
think that I shall never see
A
billboard as lovely as a tree.
Perhaps
unless the billboards fall,
I’ll
never see a tree at all.
Like his New Yorker
colleague, James Thurber, Nash had poor eyesight that made bird watching
difficult for him. Here are parts of his poem about his problems:
Since
I'm both myopic and astigmatic,
My
aim turned out to be erratic,
And
I, bespectacled and binocular,
Exposed
myself to comment jocular.
We
don't need too much birdlore, do we,
To
tell a flamingo from a towhee;
Yet
I cannot, and never will,
Unless
the silly birds stand still.
And he finishes in spectacular fashion:
But
I sometimes visualize in my gin
The
Audubon that I audubin.
This delightful poet richly deserves the many honors bestowed upon him
including the postage stamp just issued in his name.
-- Gerry Rising