The Ostrich - Analysis

A joke that turns on bodily exaggeration

Ogden Nash’s The Ostrich is a tiny comic portrait that treats the animal less like wildlife and more like a bundle of ridiculous proportions. The central claim feels simple: the ostrich is so physically outsized that ordinary expectations about grace or dignity can’t hold. Nash starts with the grand travel-poster phrase roams the great Sahara, then immediately collapses that grandeur into a series of blunt body facts: mouth is wide, neck is narra (a deliberately silly near-rhyme that sounds like a child inventing language on the spot). The poem’s humor comes from making the ostrich’s anatomy both impressive and faintly absurd.

Admiration vs. relief: the speaker’s quiet confession

The tonal turn arrives with the speaker’s sudden, personal admission: I’m glad it sits. Up to that point, the voice is mock-scientific, listing features. Then it becomes frankly human and a little relieved. That relief reveals the poem’s key tension: the ostrich’s long and lofty legs are framed as majestic, yet they also become a problem the speaker has to manage in imagination. The final line suggests that if such a tall creature had to lay eggs while standing, the world would feel slightly too chaotic—or too slapstick—to bear. The poem’s punchline is that nature’s impressive designs also invite goofy, domestic worries.