Ogden Nash

There is one thing that ought to be taught in all the colleges,
Which is that people ought to be taught not to go around always making apologies.
I don't mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five dollars or step on your feet,
Because I think that is sort of sweet;
No, I object to one kind of apology alone,
Which is when people spend their time and yours apologizing for everything they own.
You go to their house for a meal,
And they apologize because the anchovies aren't caviar or the partridge is veal;
They apologize privately for the crudeness of the other guests,
And they apologize publicly for their wife's housekeeping or their husband's jests;
If they give you a book by Dickens they apologize because it isn't by Scott,
And if they take you to the theater, they apologize for the acting and the dialogue and the plot;
They contain more milk of human kindness than the most capacious diary can,
But if you are from out of town they apologize for everything local and if you are a foreigner they apologize for everything American.
I dread these apologizers even as I am depicting them,
I shudder as I think of the hours that must be spend in contradicting them,
Because you are very rude if you let them emerge from an argument victorious,
And when they say something of theirs is awful, it is your duty to convince them politely that it is magnificent and glorious,
And what particularly bores me with them,
Is that half the time you have to politely contradict them when you rudely agree with them,
So I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf,
Which is don't spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.

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.

Everybody who has a baby thinks everybody who hasn't a baby ought to have a baby,
Which accounts for the success of such plays as the Irish Rose of Abie,
The idea apparently being that just by being fruitful
You are doing something beautiful,
Which if it is true
Means that the common housefly is several million times more beautiful than me or you.

I give you now Professor Twist
The conscientious scientist.
Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles”
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside
One day he missed his lovely bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
You mean,” he said “a crocodile.!

Very Like a Whale

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.

Parsley is gharsley.

Progress is a fine thing, but it's gone on long enough.

Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it's midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!

We Don't Need to Leave Yet, Do We? Or, Yes We Do

One kind of person when catching a train always wants to allow an hour to cover the ten-block trip to the terminus,
And the other kind looks at them as if they were verminous,
And the second kind says that five minutes is plenty and will even leave one minute over for buying the tickets,
And the first kind looks at them as if they had cerebral rickets.
One kind when theater-bound sups lightly at six and hastens off to the play,
And indeed I know one such person who is so such that it frequently arrives in time for the last act of the matinee,
And the other kind sits down at eight to a meal that is positively sumptuous,
Observing cynically that an eight-thirty curtain never rises till eight-forty, an observation which is less cynical than bumptious.
And what the first kind, sitting uncomfortably in the waiting room while the train is made up in the yards, can never understand,
Is the injustice of the second kind's reaching their scat just as the train moves out, just as they had planned,
And what the second kind cannot understand as they stumble over the first kind's heel just as the footlights flash on at last
Is that the first kind doesn't feel the least bit foolish at having entered the theater before the cast.
Oh, the first kind always wants to start now and the second kind always wants to tarry,
Which wouldn't make any difference, except that each other is what they always marry.

Cuckoos lead Bohemian lives,
They fail as husbands and as wives,
Therefore they cynically disparage
Everybody else's marriage

- Ogden Nash, The Cucko

How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle,
And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle.
What was it, anyway, that angry thing that flew at me?
I am unused to banshees crying Boo at me.
Your wife can’t be a banshee — Or can she?

Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.

You can have my jellyfish
I am not sellyfish

Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda's sight
Is old and gray and dirty;
Twenty-nine she was last night;
This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda is a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,
Draw the mirror toward you;
Time who makes the years to whirl
Adorned as he adored you.

Time is timelessness for you;
Calendars for the human;
What's a year, or thirty, to
Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me, then — How old is Spring, Miranda?