Lines Indited With All The Depravity Of Poverty - Analysis

Happiness as a Price Tag (and a Dirty Joke)

Ogden Nash’s poem makes a blunt, comic claim and then keeps poisoning it: in a society like this, money doesn’t just buy comfort—it buys permission. The opening sounds almost like a cheery proverb: One way to be very happy is to be very rich. But the poem immediately shows how that kind of happiness depends on being allowed to behave badly without consequences. The speaker’s longing to be very, very rich is real, yet it’s also a spotlight thrown on a system that rewards excess and excuses depravity.

The title pushes the reader to hear the voice as half-complaint, half-performance: these are Lines Indited—as if written like a formal document—yet they’re soaked in depravity and poverty. That contradiction frames the whole poem: the speaker jokes, but the joke keeps landing on something ugly.

Luxury Goods, Comic Measurement, Real Hunger

Nash’s first images of wealth are deliberately silly in their specificity: you can buy orchids by the quire and bacon by the flitch. These old-fashioned units make abundance sound both quaint and absurd—like riches turn life into a catalog where you order beauty and food in bulk. But the pairing matters: orchids are decorative, bacon is bodily. Wealth covers both display and appetite, and does it in quantities that mock the idea of normal need.

Even here, the poem’s tone has an edge. The speaker isn’t simply admiring luxury; he’s describing a world where desire is measured in stacks and slabs, as if the rich live in a different physics of consumption.

Small Tips and Big Leaks: The Rich Get to Waste

The poem sharpens when it turns from buying to being judged. People don't mind, he says, if you only tip them a dime—not because it’s fair, but because it's very funny. That line is doing two things at once. It’s funny in the speaker’s voice, but it’s also damning: the poor are expected to be grateful for scraps and to accept stinginess as charm.

Then comes one of the poem’s clearest accusations: if you’re rich enough, you can get away with spending water like money. Water is the thing you should not waste; it is life, necessity, shared resource. Putting it in the same category as money suggests a moral inversion: wealth doesn’t only permit indulgence, it permits reckless disregard. The tone here turns from playful to pointed—Nash lets the metaphor sting because it lands on a recognizable social truth: the rich can be wasteful and still be admired or forgiven.

Poverty’s Double Bind: Spend Once, Be Shamed Forever

The speaker draws a cruel contrast: if you’re not rich, you can spend in one evening your salary for the year, and everybody will stand around and jeer. That exaggeration feels like farce, but it captures a real double bind: the poor are condemned for any lapse, any extravagance, any mistake, because they aren’t supposed to have mistakes. The crowd’s reaction—standing around to jeer—makes poverty a public spectacle.

This is the poem’s key tension: money is treated as a moral quality. The rich can under-tip and waste “water,” but the poor can’t even spend their own money without being turned into entertainment.

Buying the Unbuyable: Corruption Presented as Convenience

The most unsettling lines are the ones delivered most casually: if you are rich you don’t have to think twice about buying a judge or a horse. The pairing is savage. A horse is a normal purchase; a judge is supposed to be beyond purchase. By placing them in the same breath, Nash shows how wealth flattens categories—ethics becomes just another errand.

Other items on the list—a lower instead of an upper, a new suit, a divorce—keep mixing necessity, status, and rupture. Teeth, clothing, marriage: body, appearance, and commitment all become adjustable when you have cash. The poem doesn’t romanticize the rich; it suggests that ease itself can be corrupting, because it removes the friction where conscience might live.

Never Saying When, Sleeping In: The Dream That Condemns Itself

By the end, the speaker summarizes the fantasy: you never have to say When, and you can sleep until nine or ten. These are childish freedoms—no limits, no early alarm—yet they arrive after the chilling idea of purchasing justice. That sequencing matters: Nash makes the comforts feel complicit with the crimes. The desire to be very, very rich becomes both a confession and an indictment: the speaker wants the relief, but the poem has already shown what that relief is made of.

A Hard Question Hidden in the Punchline

If being rich means you can get away with things—stinginess, waste, even buying a judge—then what, exactly, is the speaker asking for at the end: happiness, or immunity? The poem’s joke keeps narrowing into a grim possibility: in this world, wealth isn’t just comfort, it’s a license that rewrites what counts as acceptable human behavior.