There is a disease I know;
it’s called being too serious. Don’t worry;
you won’t catch it from my poems.

~ Lines from 14th century Persian poet, Hafiz

A tense and turbulent modern world needs literature that offers light comic relief. Ogden Nash’s short whimsical poems offer just that. Every poem of his is filled with wit and humor, written with memorable lines that are guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

Frederick Ogden Nash was born in Rye, New York in 1902. Following his secondary education at St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, he attended Harvard University for the 1920–1921 academic year, and then, as he put it, he “had to drop out to earn a living.” After a brief stint as a bond salesman, he moved on in 1925 to the advertising department at the Doubleday Page publishing house, which was to become Doubleday Doran in 1927. In off hours, he tried to write serious poetry, “about beauty and truth, eternity, poignant pain” as he remembered but realized that his real talent was in writing short, witty poems about the banalities of life, especially city life. As he recalled, he reckoned that he had better “laugh at myself before anyone laughed at me.”. And so began his life-long passion with writing the whimsical verse that was to make him famous.

Nash’s first published humorous poem came one summer afternoon in 1930 as he gazed out his office window at an urban prominence, a mound covered by high-rise buildings, but still euphemistically called a “hill.” Daydreaming to keep his mind off the business of writing advertising copy, he idly jotted down some lines of verse, which he soon threw into a trash bin. Later he retrieved the paper, gave the poem the title “Spring Comes to Murray Hill,” and mailed it to the New Yorker, which accepted it. The poem shows the characteristic thought process of the Nash poetic voice, or, more precisely, the Nash character’s voice: a moment’s boredom bursting into an festival of absurdities, fractured rhyme and self-invented syllables, as shown by these lines:

I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue
And say to myself you have a responsible job, havenue?
Why then do you fritter away your time on this doggerel?
If you have a sore throat you can cure it by using a good goggerel
If you have a sore foot you can get it fixed by a chiropodist
And you can get your original sin removed by St. John the Bopodist.

This poem epitomizes Nash’s whimsical style that has endeared him to readers from his time to the present. Here, too, is Nash’s cheerful maiming of conventional syllabication and pronunciation, his novel reorganization of stresses, his near rhymes, and the extended, straggling line, which he frequently employed and which he likened to “a horse running up to a hurdle but you don’t know when it’ll jump.” This and other bits of poetry appeared in Nash’s first book of humorous verse, Hard Lines (1931), which sold unexpectedly well and launched him into a career of the poet of banalities and human foibles.

In the 1950s and 60s, Nash also wrote poetry for children while continuing to produce a steady output of adult-oriented poems. In his later works, considerable emphasis is given to mild complaints about aging and sickness, yet the comedic element is always there, concealing the underlying tone of morbidity. Till the end of his life, Ogden always knew his place in the modern poetry, as the poet who understood that life is too serious to be taken seriously.

Selected Poems of Ogden Nash

I do, I Will, I Have (Excerpts)

I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.
I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance 
entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut 
and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open. 

Moreover, 

I am quite sure that marriage is the alliance of two people 
one of whom never remembers birthdays 
and the other never forgets.

A Caution to Everybody

Consider the auk;
Becoming extinct because he forgot how to fly, and could only walk.
Consider man, who may well become extinct
Because he forgot how to walk and learned how to fly before he thinked.

I love Me

I’m always my own best cheerer;
Myself I satisfy
Till I take a look in the mirror
And see things I to I.

My Dream

This is my dream,
It is my own dream,
I dreamt it.
I dreamt that my hair was kempt.
Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.

Reflections On Ice-Breaking

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

The Cat

The trouble with a kitten is THAT
Eventually it becomes a CAT.

Crossing the Border

Senescence begins
And middle age ends
The day your descendents
Outnumber your friends.

And finally, a poignant poem about society’s indifference towards the elderly. Compared to Nash’s other works, this poem exhibits a more somber and reflective tone while retaining his characteristic wit and satire.

Old Men

People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when…
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.