A Flea And A Fly In A Flue - Analysis

A prison made of one tricky word

Ogden Nash’s tiny poem is a joke with a sharp point: language itself becomes both the cage and the key. The scene is simple—a flea and a fly in a flue are imprisoned—but the real confinement is verbal. They are stuck inside a sound-pattern (flea/fly/flue) that keeps looping, as if the poem is daring you to trip over it the way the insects might.

When escape is just a rearrangement

The central comic turn is the dialogue. The fly says let us flee! and the flea replies Let us fly! The punchline depends on the absurd near-identity of the words: each creature proposes the other’s “proper” action, swapping verbs as if identity can be switched by changing one letter. That swap is funny, but it also suggests a tiny philosophy: to get out, they don’t need a new world, only a new phrasing. Escape arrives not through force but through a verbal slip.

The “flaw in the flue” and the poem’s one real tension

The poem’s key tension is between being trapped and the ease of release. They are imprisoned, and yet the solution is almost insultingly small: they go through a flaw in the flue. A “flaw” is both a physical crack and a conceptual weakness—something that proves the prison was never perfect. Nash makes confinement feel airtight, then punctures it with a single sound: flaw/flue. The world looks locked until you notice the tiny defect.

A joke that quietly praises nimbleness

The tone is brisk, light, and smugly delighted in its own cleverness, but it isn’t empty cleverness. By letting the flea and fly solve their problem with a quick exchange of flee and fly, Nash implies that nimbleness—mental and verbal—is a kind of survival skill. The poem ends where it began, in the flue, but now it feels less like a location than a tongue-twister they’ve outwitted.