Candy
Is dandy,
But liquor
Is quicker
Quite possibly the most-recited American poem of all time. The style is the epigram, the rhyme is clever and it relates to its title in a way that speaks directly to the American consciousness then and now. The problem with a poem like this which was the pre-internet equivalent of a meme gone crazy-made viral is that it stars to worm its way into the public domain even though it’s not. And the problem there is that eventually attribution gets lost. There are three types of people in the world as it relates to this poem: Those who know Nash wrote it, those who have no idea who wrote it and those it mistakenly believe Dorothy Parker said it.
The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.
Another example of how Ogden Nash is second only to Oscar Wilde at mastering the epigram. As an example of the breadth of Nash’s popularity, this little ditty was used to bring a housewife from Texas and a housewife from Massachusetts together to find common ground on an episode of King of the Hill.
I sit in the dusk. I am all alone.
Enter a child and an ice-cream cone.
A parent is easily beguiled
By sight of this coniferous child.
This quite—not the entire poem, but merely an extract—reveals the clever ways in which Nash engages language in his poetry. “Coniferous” is an actual word, but it refers to evergreen trees and shrubs. Here, Nash takes the word out of context, out of connotation and out of definition and applies to the image of the child eating an ice cream cone to adroitly tweak his verse.
Adam
Had'em
Only someone with a reputation for humor could get away with the content of this poem. Think about it: the Garden of Eden was a paradise…yet it had fleas? Of course, one could argue that Adam did not get fleas until after the Fall. Either way, a poem that seems to define forever the fact that being a poet isn’t really work—you know, actual honest work—is actually pretty philosophically deep. Using just two and a half words, Nash makes a funny joke while also setting up a great spiritual debate. Did fleas co-exist peacefully with other animals in the Garden of Eden and if so, why did all the animals have to suffer along with mankind for Eve’s trespass against eating the forbidden fruit?
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.
One of the legacies of Ogden Nash is that he was—along with John Updike—one of the foremost chroniclers of the state of the relationship of American marriages of the 20th century. What Updike did in all serious through a series of novels, Nash did with humor through a continuous series of poetry throughout his entire career.
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.
In addition to a running commentary on the state of the American marriage, Nash engaged his natural gift for parody to satirize the sacrifices needing to be made to transform the simple joys of old-fashioned life into the coveted conveniences of the jet age. The spread of the interstate highway system was transforming life in America in small but pivotal ways that most Americans were too busy to note. Ogden Nash was recording it all for posterity. Even the title is a little dig at a way of life that was about to missing in action. The open road no longer had quite the same spirit of adventure when it was a two-lane superhighway built for speed, not sightseeing.
