Ogden Nash, King of Light Verse Quiz

Answer: quicker

This seven-word poem is titled "Reflections on Ice-Breaking". Ogden Nash wrote over 600 poems, lyrics, and verses, many of them short bits like this. Fourteen volumes of his work were published between 1931 and 1972.

Answer: true

Ogden Nash frequently wrote in rhymed couplets, for example:

"A girl who's bespectacled
May not get her nectacled."

The above couplet is also an example of Nash's unconventional use of spelling. Here, nectacled is "neck tickled" written as a single word to sound like bespectacled.

Another example of this irregular spelling is his couplet: "If called by a panther / Don't anther." (Here, answer is spelled anther to force the rhyme and inspire a laugh.)

Answer: cow

Ogden Nash wrote a series of short, popular poems about animals. His first name was Frederic, but he went by his middle name of Ogden. Nash was born August 19, 1902 in Rye, New York. He attended Harvard University but dropped out after a year.

Answer: false

He was actually fairly well respected by the establishment, to the point that some of his poems were even included in some serious anthologies. His work can, for example, be found in "A New Anthology of Modern Poetry" compiled by Selden Rodman in 1946.

Answer: Shut up

This poem is titled "A Word to Husbands".

Ogden Nash held a lot of different jobs. He worked as a teacher at St. George's School, which he also attended as a youth, and sold bonds in New York. He wrote advertisements for Barron Collier and was also an editor at Doubleday.

Answer: parents

Ogden Nash's first collection of poems, "Hard Lines", was published in 1931, the same year he married Frances Leonard. After years of moving around, Nash finally settled in Baltimore, where he lived for thirty-seven years.

Answer: Speak Low

"Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" is from "Les Miserables", "The Music of the Night" from "Phantom of the Opera", and "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" from "The Sound of Music". The music for "Speak Low" was written by the German composer Kurt Weill. A hit single of "Speak Low", featuring Guy Lombardo and his orchestra, came out in 1944 with Billy Leach singing the lead vocal. Barbra Streisand included a version of the song on her 1993 album "Back to Broadway".

Answer: done

These lines come from "Portrait of the Artist As a Prematurely Old Man". Nash continues:

"The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of sin you must be pursuing,
Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing."

This is probably a pun on the church liturgy that runs, "Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone."

Answer: Joyce Kilmer's

Joyce Kilmer wrote "Trees", which begins "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree." The poem is often read or recited by American schoolchildren on Arbor Day. Ogden Nash's parody, titled "Song of the Open Road", was published in an October 1932 issue of "The New Yorker". Later versions of the poem use the word "indeed" instead of "perhaps."

Answer: husbands

These lines come from the long poem "What Almost Every Woman Knows Sooner or Later", which lists the many potential faults of a husband, and finally concludes:

"Husbands are indeed an irritating form of life,
And yet through some quirk of Providence most of them are really very deeply ensconced in the affection of their wife."

This poem was included in Ogden Nash's 1935 collection "The Primrose Path."

Answer: weigh too much

These lines come from the poem "Curl up and Diet" which appeared in Nash's 1938 collection "I'm a Stranger Here Myself". The poem continues:

"They may be as slender as a sylph or a dryad,
But just let them get on the scales and they embark on a doleful jeremiad:
No matter how low the figure the needle happens to touch,
They always claim it is at least five pounds to much;
To the world she may appear slinky and feline,
But she inspects herself in the mirror and cries, Oh, I look like a sea lion."

Answer: Responsibility

This two-line poem is titled "Common Sense" and was published in the poets 1931 collection "Hard Lines".

Ogden Nash's popularity was widespread enough that his work was published in both "Sports Magazine" and "The New Yorker". His "Line-Up for Yesterday" was published in the January 1949 issue of "Sports Magazine". An alphabetical poem, it begins each line with a different letter of the alphabet while listing off the baseball greats.

Answer: The Catsup Bottle

Bottle rhymes with lottle, and when you try to get catsup (ketchup) out of the bottle by slapping it, it is indeed often the case that you get a little followed by a lot.

Ogden Nash married Frances Leonard and had two children named Isabel and Linell. He died in May of 1971 because of complications from his Crohn's disease, which may have been aggravated by food poisoning.

Answer: Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to his Love" begins:

"Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields."

Ogden Nash's poem begins with the same two lines but then, satirically, takes a quite different direction:

"Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
Of a marriage conducted with economy
In the Twentieth Century Anno Donomy.
We'll live in a dear little walk-up flat
With practically room to swing a cat
And a potted cactus to give it hauteur
And a bathtub equipped with dark brown water.
[. . . ] We'll bus for miles on holidays
For seas at depressing matinees,
And every Sunday we'll have a lark
And take a walk in Central Park.
And one of these days not too remote
You'll probably up and cut my throat."

Answer: money

These lines come from "The Terrible People", which begins:

"People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it,
And I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it.
I don't mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it,
But I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it."

This poem was included in Nash's 1933 collection "Happy Days". Nash's poems have been turned into children's books, including "The Tale of the Custard Dragon", "The Adventures of Isabel", and "Ogden Nash's Zoo", which includes his illustrated poems about various animals.