Like Shakespeare’s Cassius, February has a “lean and hungry look.” The month is short, which is all to the good given its Arctic blasts of wind and storm. But even so, the time we spend in winter’s meat locker can muster up moods as gray as the season’s gray days. Then March arrives with its promises of more temperate weather, yet all too often it unleashes one last fusillade of ice, snow, and wind to shake the rooftops, dashing hopes for an early spring and deepening the wintertime blues.
One genre of literature—light verse—can help alleviate this cold-weather funk. Reading some poems of elegance and wit intended to entertain and amuse can bring some chuckles, warm the heart, and spark the dulled imagination.
‘A Philosopher, Albeit a Laughing One’
Those words were one critic’s compliment to Ogden Nash (1902–71), whom many consider the Grand Master of American light verse and whose humorous poems take as their subjects everything from leopards and turtles to children and marriage.‘Advice 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.
‘The Fly’
The Lord in His wisdom made the fly, And then forgot to tell us why.
And the kids might enjoy “The Cow":The cow is of the bovine ilk; One end is moo, the other, milk.
A longer poem, “Common Cold,” certainly fits the winter season. In it, a patient—a hypochondriac like Nash himself—scorns his doctor’s diagnosis, explaining to readers that nothing is common about his cold with “its racking snuffle, snort, and sniff.” Here are the first and last stanzas:Go hang yourself, you old M.D.! You shall not sneer at me. Pick up your hat and stethoscope, Go wash your mouth with laundry soap; I contemplate a joy exquisite I’m not paying you for your visit. I did not call you to be told My malady is a common cold.
...A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth! Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth; Don Juan was a budding gallant, And Shakespeare’s plays show signs of talent; The Arctic winter is fairly coolish, And your diagnosis is fairly foolish. Oh what a derision history holds For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!
Wit, Wisdom, and a Poet With Class
Though immensely popular in his day, Nash never won a Pulitzer for his whimsical poetry. That honor belongs to a contemporary, Phyllis McGinley (1905–78), the first American poet, male or female, to win that prize for light verse.
She said, If tomorrow my world were torn in two, Blacked out, dissolved, I think I would remember (As if transfixed in unsurrendering amber) This hour best of all the hours I knew: When cars came backing into the shabby station, Children scuffing the seats, and the women driving With ribbons around their hair, and the trains arriving, And the men getting off with tired but practiced motion.
Yes, I would remember my life like this, she said: Autumn, the platform red with Virginia creeper, And a man coming toward me, smiling, the evening paper Under his arm, and his hat pushed back on his head; And wood smoke lying like haze on the quiet town, And dinner waiting, and the sun not yet gone down.
Her poetry also conveyed hard truths, like this one found in “A Choice of Weapons”:Sticks and stones are hard on bones, Aimed with angry art. Words can sting like anything, But silence breaks the heart.
His millions make museums bright; Harvard anticipates his will; While his young typist weeps at night Over a druggist’s bill.
“A Garland of Precepts” reveals McGinley’s technical skills, her fascination with everyday things, and a bit of advice about taking advice:Though a seeker since my birth, Here is all I’ve learned on earth, This the gist of what I know: Give advice and buy a foe. Random truths are all I find Stuck like burs about my mind. Salve a blister. Burn a letter. Do not wash a cashmere sweater. Tell a tale but seldom twice. Give a stone before advice.
Pressed for rules and verities, All I recollect are these: Feed a cold to starve a fever. Argue with no true believer. Think-too-long is never-act. Scratch a myth and find a fact. Stitch in time saves twenty stitches. Give the rich, to please them, riches. Give to love your hearth and hall. But do not give advice at all.
The Cheerful Cherub
Rebecca McCann’s exact date of birth is uncertain, but when she died in 1927 from pneumonia she was between 30 and 32 years of age. Though there is a Cheerful Cherub club on Facebook, McCann’s “Cheerful Cherub” poems and the drawings that accompanied them are little known today, which is a pity. These snatches of verse and line drawings of a little angel and a dog were popular nearly 100 years ago in newspapers and after her death were compiled into a book, the “Complete Cheerful Cherub,” by a friend and admirer, children’s author Mary Graham Bonner.
‘Impulse’
I’d like to hug the human race So much I feel that I adore it But if I tried this on the street I s’pose I’d get arrested for it.
‘Love’
A man can own uncounted gold And land and buildings tall, But love is just to give away— It can’t be owned at all.
‘Appetite’
My appetite for life is large. I want adventures far away, Yet leave untasted half the time The humbler joys of Every day.
Without the cherub and the dog, these poems may seem trite and childlike. Add McCann’s drawings, and they’re still childlike but with a sweet charm that can bring a smile and warm the heart on the coldest day. Perhaps someday a wise publisher will see fit to bring the “Complete Cheerful Cherub” back into print, offering it as gift book for birthdays and graduations, and as a sparkle of sunshine on the bleakest winter day.A snowy path for squirrel and fox, It winds between the wintry firs. Snow-muffled are its iron rocks, And o’er its stillness nothing stirs.
But low, bend low a listening ear! Beneath the mask of moveless white A babbling whisper you shall hear— Of birds and blossoms, leaves and light.
