Ogden Nash's "Very Like a Whale"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2024

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem–a layered, jokingly-serious response to one of last week’s–comes from Ogden Nash, dubbed the ‘Laurate of Light Verse.’ Which banner would you rally under–Nash or Byron?

One of the most widely appreciated and imitated writers of light verse, Frediric Ogden Nash was born in Rye, New York, on August 19, 1902, to Edmund Strudwick and Mattie Nash. He came from a distinguished family; the city of Nashville, Tennessee, was named in honor of one of his forbearers. Nash attended Harvard College, but dropped out after only one year. He worked briefly on Wall Street, and as a schoolteacher, before becoming a copywriter. In 1925, he took a job in the marketing department with the publishing house Doubleday.

Nash's first published poems began to appear in the New Yorker around 1930. His first collection of poems, Hard Lines (Simon & Schuster), was published in 1931. The book was a tremendous success; it went into seven printings in its first year alone, and Nash quit his job with Doubleday. That same year, he married Frances Rider Leonard; they had two children. Nash worked briefly for the New Yorker in 1932, before deciding to devote himself full-time to his verse.

Nash considered himself a "worsifier." Among his best known lines are "Candy / Is dandy, / But liquor / Is quicker" and "If called by a panther / Don't anther." His poems also had an intensely anti-establishment quality that resounded with many Americans, particularly during the Depression. Nash was a keen observer of American social life, and frequently mocked religious moralizing and conservative politicians. His work is often compared with other satirists of the time, including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and H. L. Mencken. He appeared regularly on radio and on television, and he drew huge audiences for his readings and lectures.

Nash was also the author of three screenplays for MGM, and with S. J. Perelmen, he wrote the 1943 Broadway hit One Touch of Venus. In the 1950s, Nash focused on writing poems for children, including the collection Girls Are Silly (Franklin Watts, 1962). He died on May 19, 1971.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, April 2, 2024.
0:08.7	Today's poem is by Ogden Nash, a great American humorist poet,
0:15.3	and it's called Very Like a Whale.
0:20.1	This might have been a good fit for yesterday, being April Fool's Day, and this poem being a bit of light verse.
0:29.6	But like the best light verse, it disguises a more serious topic.
0:37.5	This is a great companion piece to the poem we aired last week,
0:42.4	the destruction of Sinakurib, as Ogden Nash calls out Lord Byron by name.
0:49.6	But there's a question that you have or should have,
0:56.4	by the time you get to the end of this poem,
1:12.8	is Ogden Nash in step with the rest of his 20th century poetic contemporaries in criticizing and decrying the over-ornamentation of poetry?
1:23.8	Or is Ogden Nash satirizing the 20th century voices that complain, criticize the ornamental quality of classic poetry, traditional poetry?
1:33.5	Or is he doing both at once? That's the beauty of poetry. You can say more than one thing at once without necessarily overcommitting yourself
1:40.3	to either position. I think Nash has brilliantly walked that tightrope here.
1:49.4	There's more, I could say, but why spoil it? Here is very like a whale.
2:00.1	One thing that literature would be greatly the better for would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and metaphor.
2:09.5	Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutans, or Celts, can't seem just to say that anything is the thing that it is but have to go out of their
2:19.4	way to say that it is like something else. What does it mean when we are told that that Assyrian came
2:26.1	down like a wolf on the fold? In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience to know
2:32.3	that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian.
2:35.1	It was a lot of Assyrown, however, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and
2:40.9	thus hinder longevity, we'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
	...

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