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He lived for much of his life in Baltimore, Maryland, where he died in 1971. His work earned him a great deal of fame in the United States, where he was a regular guest on television shows. He later worked as an editor for the publisher Doubleday, and it was while he was working in publishing that he began to publish his own poems. He subsequently became a writer of advertisements, working for the same company, Barron Collier, that had previously employed F. After quitting as a teacher he took up a job selling bonds, but later joked that in two years of the job he sold a grand total of one job (and that was to his godmother). He once said that he thought in terms of rhyme, which came naturally to him. Ogden Nash (1902-71), whose first name was actually Frederic (he opted to use his middle name as his published name), was born in Rye, New York. Nash wrote a lot of verse – he produced 14 collections between 19 – but this collection gathers together many of his greatest and most famous short poems. Behind this comic gem is a poignant point, that as we get older we lose touch with our friends, while we lose others to death as we grow older.Īgain, though, a lot of the sheer delight of the poem lies in the sounds Nash employs so perfectly, such as the internal rhyme (or near-rhyme) of Senescence with descendants, or the fact that there is an end in descendants.įor a good edition of Ogden Nash’s poetry, we recommend The Best of Ogden Nash. Sticking with family, Nash offers a witty four-line take on old age in this poem, arguing that the line between middle age and old age is crossed when your descendants outnumber your friends. We are back to the topic of growing old here. We have selected more classic poems for husbands here. This poem would make the perfect addition to a witty wedding speech. As the final two lines have it: whenever you’re in the wrong, come clean and admit it, but whenever you’re right, ‘shut up’, because no wife will want to hear you bang on about how you were right and she was wrong. Part of the joy comes from the short first line giving way to a much longer second line this is mirrored in the third and final lines, too.Īgain, the punchline (if we can refer to the end of his poems as such) comes in the surprise of the final word and its unconventional nature, but there is also something childlike, once again, in the non-standard past-tense verb thinked.Īnother ‘warning’ poem giving advice, though in this case Nash is specifically addressing husbands in a comical, tongue-in-cheek way.
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Nash warns us to consider whether mankind may go extinct because of the reverse problem, namely that he ‘learned how to fly before he thinked’. Nash begins this short poem by considering the auk, and why it went extinct – because it forgot how to fly, and ‘could only walk’.
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There is something about the phrase ‘if I am not mistaken’ in the first line which wryly winks at the reader, as if to say we both know that nobody really knows what goes into sausages. But as so often with an Ogden Nash poem, paraphrasing it in this way makes it sound serious when it is light-hearted. Vegetarians of a sensitive disposition should look away now: having outlined the various foods the pig provides us with, Nash declares that the pig is stupid for giving himself up to become food for our table. We are back in the realm of animal poems for the seventh Ogden Nash poem on the list! It shows a more serious side to Nash which is not often talked about, and shows that he was more than just a comic poet (not that being a successful comic poet is exactly a minor achievement in itself).
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Instead the language is not just plain but free from any tongue-in-cheek, nonsense words. There is also none of the linguistic jiggery-pokery we find in many other Ogden Nash poems on this list.
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But unusually in Nash’s oeuvre, ‘Old Men’ is poignant and moving, stating that people expect old men to die and so do not mourn them, but ‘the old man knows when an old man dies’. This poem offers a very different attitude to the ageing man from the view we get in a ‘straight’ or serious poem like Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. Even the misuses of grammar and syntax reflect the young child’s attempt to articulate these questions. There is something wide-eyed and innocent about his way of looking at animals in particular, as if encountering them for the first time.
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And this poem is also a good opportunity to point out the childlike quality of much Ogden Nash poetry.