'The Cow'


The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.


___


I'm working with one class on some Ogden Nash poems. My belief - hope? - is that by looking at comic writing many of the essentials of poetic language (diction, rhythm, sound, etc.) stand out in greater relief.

A seemingly inconsequential poem such as 'The Cow' opens up the power of rhyme as Nash rhymes "ilk" with "milk". For me, it's the juxtaposition of the abstract noun with such an ordinary, daily, unremarkable concrete noun. Two separate orders of language and experience are suddenly brought into adjacency simply through a chance resemblance of sound. And the texture of "ilk" - spiky, awkward, still dragging on its Anglo Saxon roots - at odds with its conceptual, categorical sense.

Another example, perhaps, of the humour latent within L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry?