Ah, gentle reader. I’ve mentioned that I have read a couple of books of recent acquisition (The Art of Emily McGee and Sheer Poetry, both of which I bought last weekend) whilst reading The Life of Greece–ah, given that it’s been on my chairside table in progress for several years, you can surmise all of my reading since Our Oriental Heritage in 2023 has been breaks from reading the second volume of the Durant. So this book, which I bought within that interim (in May 2025), is no big deal except that it’s the only book where I’ve read a couple poems and then thought, “Hey, how’s Greek history going?” and picked up the Durant again to end the night.
I mean, you know I love me some Ogden Nash, gentle reader; this blog has, what, seven (now eight) book reports on his poetry, the most recent being The Old Dog Barks Backwards in January 2025 and the oldest being Versus in September 2007, when I would read the collections to my young children whilst they played (although in 2007, I only had a young child). But somehow I rate-limited this book to a couple of poems a night until last night when I powered through the last of them.
The book might be a topical compilation from other works, as the original copyright dates range from 1931 to 1970 (with some renewed because, gentle reader, in the olden days, copyrights lapsed before Disney got tired of them). The topic: Illness and growing older. Since I’m generally a pretty healthy guy, not suffering a lot from colds or flu, and, because of the vaccine schedule in the 1970s, neither measles or mumps either, although I remember Cracked magazine making light of the swelling associated with mumps, so it was in living memory then–since I’m generally a pretty healthy guy, I did not get a whole lot from the illness/hypochondria poems, but I did feel a twinge from the growing older posts–although he puts that turn into old man in the middle 40s when I still felt pretty young, back when I would not pull a hammy doing a head-high round kick with pop to it (which I recently did, dang it).
A couple bits worth quoting, including “A Man Can Complain, Can’t He?” where he repeats, “Another day, another dolor.” I myself have said this, so either I read this in a collection almost 20 years ago and have been inadvertantly quoting it ever since or the two of us came up with the pun independently.
From “This Is Going To Hurt A Little Bit”:
Because some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.
Ah, gentle reader. I was afraid of dentistry for a while until I got my teeth cleaned up twenty-five years ago, and now I go thrice a year for cleanings. But once you’ve lived with a filling rubbing on a dental nerve for weeks thanks to a sedation dentist who went a little deeper than he thought and only after picking a new dentist got emergency surgery where the numbing shot brought the first real peace in a month, after that, there’s little pain a simple dental visit can bring. Although my latest trusted dentist just retired. Perhaps I’ll go back to fearing it or avoiding it if the new guy seems eager to bill.
From “Let’s Not Climb The Washington Monument Tonight”, we get this then-contemporary allusion:
It is when you wouldn’t visit Gina Lollobrigida or the Aga Khan if it meant sleeping on a sofa or a cot
Ah, gentle reader. I understand the allusion not because I have a degree in English and Philosophy and continue to read them as I age but because I read Kim du Toit (link maybe NSFW depending upon your work).
At any rate, I have to wonder if Ogden Nash set out to lightly parody the vernacular poets popular in his youth, such as James Whitcomb Riley and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then he got stuck in the wordplay because he, too, discovered that’s what audiences wanted. I suppose a real Nash scholar who has read all his papers and letters would know, but I am not that guy.
I might have a collection or two of his still floating about, but I probably won’t jump right into it even if I discover it. After all, I re-seeded my stacks last weekend with small collections of poetry that I will likely get to first. But: Maybe not before I finish The Life of Greece–I have determined that the volume contains almost 100 pages of notes, bibliography, and index, so I am doner than I thought–so I might power through it in the near term.
