The Hunter -- Ogden Nash

(Poem #1825) The Hunter The hunter crouches in his blind. 'Neath camouflage of every kind. This grown-up man, with luck and pluck, Is hoping to outwit a duck. -- Ogden Nash

Scratch practically any human activity, and you'll find underneath a rich
current of the ridiculous - a fact gleefully exploited by generations of
humorists. And few poets did it better than Nash, with his keen sense of the
humour inherent in language itself - not just the meaning, but the sound and
feel of the words, and the unconscious rules behind grammar, syntax and
etymology. Consider, for example, one of his very finest lines,

  The Cold Crusading for Democracy;
  The Führer of the Streptococcracy.

(from "The Common Cold", Poem #325) - the gleefully coined word
"streptococcracy" lends that extra touch of hilarity to the already funny
image, elevating the whole to the sublimely ridiculous.

Today's poem is nice example of Nash's art and craft, chosen to show that
he can be amusing even without resorting to typically Nashian 'tricks'
like invented words, strained rhymes and comically exaggerated and varied
line lengths[1]. The fish-in-a-barrel shot at the unfortunate breed of duck
hunters and the four-line form (ideally suited to laconic humour, as I've
noted on several occasions) are given that little extra fillip by the bonus
rhyme, making the reader (whether he realises it consciously or not) laugh
at the *sound* of the words as well as their sense. Try substituting "with
skill and pluck" in the third line to see what I mean - the poem immediately
loses a certain indefinable something.

[1] Which is not to denigrate those tricks - they have, in Nash's capable
hands, produced works of rare genius. It's just that people tend to think of
them first and foremost when they think of Nash; I wanted to run a more
'normal' poem to demonstrate that such devices were a technique used by an
already-witty writer, not a crutch to evoke a cheap and easy laugh.

martin

[Links]

Wikipedia on Nash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogden_Nash