Ill Get One Tomorrow - Analysis

A comic plea that hides a real fear of upkeep

Ogden Nash’s speaker sounds like he’s begging for rescue, but the poem’s central joke carries a sharper truth: he is less afraid of hair than of the small, recurring obligation of maintaining himself. The opening cry, Barber, barber, come and get me, frames the barber not as a service worker but as an emergency responder. Hair becomes an invading force, and the speaker turns his own procrastination into a kind of melodrama, as if avoidance were something that simply happens to him rather than something he chooses.

Hair as an invasive plant and a petty tormentor

The poem makes hair feel alive and embarrassing. It arrives in hairy torrents, climbs like ivy around the ears, and turns into creeping flora and a jungle threatening the collar. This isn’t just description; it’s a way of saying the body keeps growing whether you attend to it or not. Even the sensation is made humiliatingly intimate: hair trip it tickles down the neck, a childish irritation that the speaker can’t ignore but also won’t fix. The comedy depends on how minor the problem is compared to the grand language used to describe it.

The minutes ten: self-accusation and the shame of being irrational

The most revealing lines are the questions the speaker asks himself: why he doesn’t visit, why he grudge the minutes ten in the barber’s smiling den, why he would rather choke on hair than sit in the chair. He piles up comparisons to remove every reasonable excuse. Other men are no busier, no wealthier, they pay a modest fee and keep tidy. Against that ordinary competence, the speaker casts himself as shy and flustered, a cowardly custard. The tension is plain: he wants relief, but he also wants an explanation that will make his avoidance feel less like weakness.

The bell strikes: when disgust beats inertia

A clear turn arrives when he declares, the bell has rung and the hour has struck. Suddenly, sloth is personified as something muscular: Sloth strong, the hair is strong. The speaker acts only when he feels overwhelmed, which turns an easy routine into a crisis. That’s why he calls the barber’s tools not just shears but scythes, and he orders giant harvesters and reapers as if his head were farmland. The exaggeration admits how procrastination works: what could have been a small weekly trim becomes a bumper crop threatening to overwhelm your shop.

Wanting baldness: the fantasy of a final solution

His most extreme request reveals the deepest contradiction. He begs the barber to be anything but clip me close, then demands Leave me hairless, even to make me bald. The speaker doesn’t merely want a haircut; he wants to erase the very condition that will require another haircut. Baldness becomes a fantasy of freedom from repetition, payment, and dependence. That’s why the ending is so bluntly comic and so oddly sad: never think of you again. The barber, who began as rescuer, becomes a reminder that the body’s needs return—unless you can somehow abolish them.

A sharper question the poem won’t let go of

If the barber’s shop is a smiling den and the fee is a fraction of a dollar, why does the speaker treat the visit like an ordeal requiring reapers and extra sweepers? The poem’s logic suggests an uncomfortable answer: the humiliation isn’t the hair itself, but the moment of submitting to ordinary care—and admitting you should have done it sooner.