One Third Of The Calendar - Analysis

A calendar that measures illness, not holidays

Ogden Nash’s poem turns the year into a comic ledger of what winter does to a household: it doesn’t bring picturesque snow, it brings recurring confinement. The title, One Third of the Calendar, hints that this is a report from the year’s grimmest stretch, and the months that follow confirm it. January’s opening, everything freezes, sounds like weather talk, but the next lines pivot immediately to family logistics—We have two children—as if the cold and the childcare problem are the same phenomenon. The poem’s central claim is that in this home, winter is not an atmosphere; it is a routine of managing sickness, school, and bed.

The joke of she’ses and the seriousness underneath

Nash’s signature silliness—Both are she'ses—isn’t just a cute rhyme; it frames the speaker as someone joking to stay sane. The household’s January rule is grimly practical: One girl in bed, and one in school. It reads like a rotation, almost an institutional schedule, and the rhyme’s bounce can’t hide how resigned it is. The poem repeatedly insists on the girls’ doubleness—We own a pair, Each of our children has a sister—as if the family’s defining fact is not personality but pairing, two bodies that catch what the other has and then trade places.

February’s blessing that sounds like a weary prayer

In February, the weather escalates—the blizzard whirls—and the speaker’s language drifts into mock-ceremonial gratitude: Blessings upon each head. But the blessing lands on a scene that hasn’t changed at all: The one in school and the one in bed. That repetition is the poem’s bleakest punch, because it implies that even prayer can only consecrate the same pattern. The tone here is affectionate but exhausted: the speaker loves the children, yet can only describe them by their current location in the sickroom shuffle.

March: two children fused like a fairy tale, stuck to medicine

March turns the sisters into a single organism. The month is cringe and bluster, and the girls cling together like Hansel and Gretel—a comparison that is funny on the surface but edged with anxiety. Hansel and Gretel are children in danger, improvising survival; Nash’s version is safer, yet it still pictures childhood as vulnerable and huddled. The image that follows is startlingly specific: noses glued to the benzoin kettle, a medicinal steam device. The fairy-tale allusion and the clinical object sit side by side, suggesting a winter where imagination is replaced by treatment, and where the girls’ closeness is less about play than about sharing symptoms.

April’s throat doctors and the poem’s hard turn into wanting

April arrives with impetuous waters, but the household doesn’t thaw into spring; it moves into appointments—doctors looking down throats of daughters. The poem’s turn comes with the speaker’s sudden hypothetical: If we had a son too, and even a thoroughbred. It’s an absurd wish-list, and it reveals the pressure under the joking. The final cascade—We'd have a horse, And a boy, and then the deadpan return, And two girls / In bed—makes the desire painfully clear. Even fantasies of expansion don’t change the household law: sickness wins, and the girls remain the fixed point of the calendar.

The tender contradiction: gratitude for two, longing for different

The poem’s key tension is that the speaker both blesses the daughters and wishes for a son—yet the wish doesn’t feel like rejection so much as desperation for variety, relief, or a break in the pattern. The children are called little girls and daughters, never mocked, while the speaker’s own language is what gets bent and broken to cope. The poem ends by admitting, in the cleanest possible rhyme, that the parent’s imagination can add a horse and a boy, but cannot subtract the simplest reality: winter has claimed the bed, and it keeps claiming it again.