This week’s poem “Peekaboo, I Almost See You” is by Ogden Nash and is chosen in tribute to everyone who finds themselves fiddling with multiple pairs of spectacles.
And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one set of glasses won’t do.
Ogden Nash (1902—1971)
Poem 329. Peekaboo, I Almost See You
Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it,
But there comes a day when your eyes are all right but your arm isn’t long enough to hold the telephone book where you can read it,
And your friends get jocular, so you go to the oculist,
And of all your friends he is the joculist,
So over his facetiousness let us skim,
Only noting that he has been waiting for you ever since you said Good evening to his grandfather clock under the impression that it was him,
And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one set of glasses won’t do.
You need two.
One for reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Keats’s “Endymion” with,
And the other for walking around without saying Hello to strange wymion with.
So you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to put on your reading glasses, and then remembering that your reading glasses are upstairs or in the car,
And then you can’t find your seeing glasses again because without them on you can’t see where they are.
Enough of such mishaps, they would try the patience of an ox,
I prefer to forget both pairs of glasses and pass my declining years saluting strange women and grandfather clocks.
Ogden Nash was a master observer of the small irritations of life, and here he comments on the frustrations of needing and using spectacles.
He starts with the feeling many of us have encountered when despite the many good things that come with middle age, we begin to realise that the text we are reading has mysteriously blurred, although we could swear it was perfectly legible on the previous day.
This inevitably leads to an interview at the optician’s shop where we get a nice comedy moment as he hails the clock under the impression that it’s the oculist himself which reminds me of a The Two Ronnies sketch set in an optician’s shop where the optician is as blind as his customer.
Nash then conjures up the moment where, adorned with those frames where lenses are slid in and out and twisted around so adroitly by the optometrist, he strains to pick out the letters on the bottom line of the eye chart (nowadays a series of randomly generated letters on a computer screen).
Learning to his dismay that he needs glasses for reading as well as for navigating through life, he ultimately tires of constantly exchanging the one for the other and being unable to find either and discards both sets, preferring to “pass my declining years saluting strange women and grandfather clocks.”
Nash’s trademarks are all present in this poem: the coining of strange but recognisable words to form a rhyme (Endymion/wymion and oculist/joculist) which is reminiscent of the words in “Nomenklaturik” from a couple of weeks ago; the inordinately long lines which still seem to scan somehow, and the wit that permeates all his poems.
Peekaboo is the simplest of games, and babies love it—the act of hiding one’s face and then suddenly revealing it seems to entertain them enormously: at least, it did for my nephews! The metaphor of knowing someone is there but being unable to discern their face transfers well to the feeling we get when we see a person but are unable to make out their features.
I discovered this poem in the Oxford Book of Comic Verse many years ago, and it’s always amused me, even when I found I needed help to see clearly when out for a walk.