Idiocies of Humanity- Weird Verses of Ogden Nash

Gifted for creating such exceptionally arresting and perceptive observations as, “Some pains are physical, and some pains are mental, but the one that’s both is dental.”, “Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naive.”, or one of the most famous ones “The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other milk.”, Frederic Ogden Nash, the celebrated American poet, died this day, the 19th of May, in 1971.
New York Times wrote on his death, ‘Considered by many of his admirers to be a sort of Abraham Lincoln of poetry, and they called his mangled verse an emancipation proclamation for all would‐be poets who harbored the illusion that poetry had to follow some strict law of rhyme and meter.’
‘Actually, the man who could blithely rhyme “petunia” with “Pennsylvunia” and deprecate a hated herb with the lines “Parsley/ Is gharsley” was a careful craftsman.’
Building his reputation on his long, straggling lines of wildly irregular length, often accentuated with extravagantly misspelled words, he weaved weird rhymes. A closer look, however, revealed, a spontaneous yet meticulous meter and a concern, both compelling and convincing.
Transition to Humour
Not that he did not try serious poetry. Till he was 23, he firmly believed that he must write poetry as it is conventionally written- orderly, rhythmic, in meter- till one fine morning he realised he needed to break free from these shackles.
“I wrote sonnets about beauty and truth, eternity, poignant pain,” he said. “That was what the people I read wrote about, too — Keats, Shelley, Byron, the classical English poets.”
As if by impulse, he decided to “laugh at myself before anyone laughed at me,” and he took to writing nonsensical verse.
One summer afternoon in 1930, as he sat at his office desk, finding it difficult to keep his mind off the business of writing advertising copy, he had “a silly idea.”
Idly, he jotted down some lines of verse, which he soon tossed into the wastebasket. Later he fished out the paper titled the lines “Spring Comes to Murray Hill,” and mailed the verse to The New Yorker.
The magazine bought the poem which began:
I sit in an office at 244 Madi son 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.
A Long Career- Distinguished and Rewarding
Thus what began as a desperate gamble, became a life- long passion bringing him recognition, fame and riches. And in the process regaled the world with an ingenious and deliciously delightful and mirthful variety of verse- short, whimsical, undisciplined, nonsensical, drole but intensely perceptive and never boring. By his own admission, he “intentionally maltreated and manhandled every known rule of grammar, prosody and spelling.”
Described by Atlantic Monthly magazine as “God’s Gift to America,” his work covered a wide range of subjects and situations. If he warned children: “If called by a panther/Don’t anther”, he counselled young men wishing to woo, in his ‘Reflections on Ice-Breaking’:
Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
And if the ice-breaking was successful and marriage followed, Nash had this further advice:
A Word to Husbands:
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
Following his 1931 debut poetry collection, Hard Lines, that sold out seven reprints in a single year, Nash was both prolific and versatile. He offered, shared and delighted the readers with his uncommon wit and uncanny powers of observations presented in a language in turn charming, amusing, titillating and probing. He was extensively published with more than two dozen volumes of verses and contributions to many magazines including Life and The New Yorker. He was eminently successful, professionally and financially. His focus, however, always remained on what he preferred to call – “My field – the minor idiocies of humanity.”
But he also wrote screenplays, lyrics, scripts for theatre and essays and appeared on various radio, game and comedy shows. His lecture tours within US and across Atlantic were hugely popular and sought after.
The Times of London
Not that he always received appreciation or acclaim. The Times of London, while reviewing one of his earlier volumes proclaimed prudishly, “Mr. Nash’s verse would be improved it the author took more care with his rhymes.”
Mr. Nash, vastly bemused, characteristically replied, “This comes from a newspaper in a country whose national anthem rhymes ‘glorious’ with ‘reign over us.’ By comparison, my stuff is Shakesspearean.”
But the poignancy and depth of her sensitivity always undergirded his apparently light and humorous descriptions. Savour this piece on old age, so sensitively and feelingly spelt,
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.
But what epitomises Ogden Nash’s creativity in all its beauty and versatility, in its appeal and attention, in its simplicity and emotion, is a poem I read in my school days, excerpts from which I must reproduce: –
This Is Just Going To Hurt A Little Bit
One thing I like less than most things is sitting in a dentist chair with
my mouth wide open.
And that I will never have to do it again is a hope that I am against hope hopen.
Because some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.
And your mouth is like a section of road that is being worked on.
And it is all cluttered up with stone crushers and concrete mixers and
drills and steam rollers and there isn’t a nerve in your head that
you aren’t being irked on.
Oh, some people are unfortunate enough to be strung up by thumbs.
And others have things done to their gums,
And your teeth are supposed to be being polished,
But you have reason to believe they are being demolished.
And the circumstance that adds most to your terror
Is that it’s all done with a mirror,
Because the dentist may be a bear, or as the Romans used to say, only
they were referring to a feminine bear when they said it, an ursa,
But all the same how can you be sure when he takes his crowbar in one
hand and mirror in the other he won’t get mixed up, the way you
do when you try to tie a bow tie with the aid of a mirror, and forget
that left is right and vice versa?
And you totter to your feet and think. Well it’s all over now and after
all it was only this once.
And he says come back in three monce.
And this, O Fate, is I think the most vicious circle that thou ever sentest, That Man has to go continually to the dentist to keep his teeth in good
condition when the chief reason he wants his teeth in good condition
is so that he won’t have to go to the dentist. 
A Timeless Legacy
Nash, who had settled in Baltimore, Maryland since 1934, suffered a stroke while being treated in hospital for kidney failure, and died on May 19, 1971. He was 68.
And while he may have written,
“Senescence begins
And middle-age ends
The day your descendants
Outnumber your friends.”,
he was neither senile, nor was abandoned by his countless admirers. He continued to be adored by them, the multitude of loving and caring men and women.
Humour poetry in common perception may lack the depth and profundity, the gravitas and grandness of the serious poetry, yet its popular appeal and acceptability remains unsurpassed. And not all of it is ephemeral. Few in this genre of poetic creativity can overshadow the genius and brilliance evident in Nash’s work.
Nash, looking back on his highly productive 40‐year writing career, once remarked “The only lines I’ve ever written which I think have any chance of surviving me were lines writ ten in my unregenerate youth.” He was, of course, referring to his now‐classic “Reflections on Ice‐Breaking”:
Candy Is dandy
But liquor Is quicker.
He was, indeed, being excessively modest.