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,