Incongruous as candy and liquor may be,
Nash nevertheless compels us to see both objects
as means to an end. Ice-breaking is Nash’s euphe-
mism for seduction, and liquor is the more effi-
cient of the two means to that end. In pairing
candy and liquor, Nash contrasts a deliberate,
manipulative and speedy means of coercion with
a romantic, socially acceptable method of wooing.
But by reminding his audience that both liquor
and candy ultimately have the same end, and by
suggesting that love can be bought, with either a
drink or a box of candy, Nash calls conventional
notions of acceptability into question.
The pattern of pairing incongruous ideas in
‘‘It Must Be the Milk,’’ and ‘‘Reflection on Ice-
Breaking’’ is duplicated in ‘‘Portrait of the Artist
as a Prematurely Old Man.’’ In this poem, Nash
demonstrates how action and inaction are rela-
tive terms with respect to sinful behavior. In
another variation on the theme of moral relativ-
ity, Nash points out the absurdity of distinctions
between activity and passivity when both have
sinful consequences. Nash begins by identifying
two kinds of sin:
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission,
and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are
doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite
and is called a sin of omission and is
equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking
people, from Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done some-
thing you shuddha.
In this example, the idea of sin is perceived
in incompatible frames of reference, ‘‘doing
something you ortant,’’ and its opposite, ‘‘not
having done something you shuddha,’’ or more
simply: doing and not doing. The incongruous
pairing of action and inaction has the intended
effect of showing the absurdity of human behav-
ior and its consequences. Ironically, intentional
sinful actions are fun, hence ‘‘good’’ from the
speaker’s perspective, while unintentional sinful
actions are not fun, hence ‘‘bad’’: ‘‘Sins of com-
mission... must at least be fun or else you
wouldn’t be committing them,’’ but
You didn’t get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forgot to
pay a bill;
You didn’t slap the lads in the tavern on the
back and loudly cry Whee,
Let’s all fail to write just one more letter
before we go home, and this round ofunwritten letters is on me.
No, you never get any fun
Out of the things you haven’t done.’’
In exposing the absurdity of a world in
which sinners who commit sins are rewarded by
having fun, Nash’s persona may be said to sat-
isfy, vicariously, the audience’s desire to voice or
act out anarchistic impulses, as when Nash’s
speaker advises that sins of commission are pref-
erable to sins of omission: ‘‘If some kind of sin
you must be pursuing, / Well, remember to do it
by doing rather than by not doing.’’ Similarly in
‘‘Reflection on Ice-Breaking,’’ Nash’s poet-fool
speaks for lovers whose principal motivation is
the immediate gratification of physical desire. In
another poem, ‘‘Epistle to the Olympians,’’ Nash
writes from the perspective of a child-adult to give
voice to the child’s objections to the seemingly
arbitrary rules of conduct that govern the behav-
ior of adults in disciplining children. In a pattern
familiar to the reader, Nash pairs incongruous
ideas, showing how, from the moral perspective
of parents, ‘‘big’’ and ‘‘little’’ are relative terms.
When one mood you are in,
My bigness is a sin:
‘‘Oh what a thing to do
For a great big girl like you!’’
But then another time
Smallness is my crime;
‘‘Stop doing whatever you’re at;
You’re far too little for that!’’
In the vicarious, anarchistic role of wish-
fulfiller, the poet-fool paradoxically serves as a
stabilizing force in an otherwise unstable world.
By defining the boundaries of what is proper,
‘‘Oh what a thing to do / For a great big girl
like you!’’ and ‘‘Stop doing whatever you’re at; /
You’re far too little for that!’’ the poet-fool thus
has ‘‘the effect of encouraging the stability of a
system by preventing it from consistently going
too far in any one extreme direction’’ (Fisher
193). Nash’s ‘‘Epistle to the Olympians’’ even
illustrates how the poet may call for a modifica-
tion to the seemingly arbitrary moral code
(defined by the extremes of bigness and small-
ness) that governs proper behavior:
Kind parents, be so kind
As to kindly make up your mind
And whisper in accents mild
The proper size for a child.
In the school of American letters, Ogden Nash
is the class-clown. As the eccentric who dares to
say what his ‘‘classmates’’ are afraid, unwilling or
incapable of saying, he is an object of admirationThe Hippopotamus