The Rhinoceros - Analysis

A comic goodbye that disguises a small cruelty

Ogden Nash’s The Rhinoceros pretends to be a light nursery rhyme about an ugly animal, but its central joke is sharper: the speaker treats the rhino as a failed object of visual pleasure and then abruptly dismisses it. Calling the rhino a homely beast and saying for human eyes he is not a feast makes the standard of value explicitly human and aesthetic. The rhino isn’t judged by what it is or does, but by how it looks to a viewer who expects beauty on demand.

From appraisal to rejection: the poem’s turn

The poem pivots on the repeated Farewell, farewell, which sounds ceremonious and even affectionate, yet functions like a door shutting. That doubled goodbye gives the insult a polite wrapper, as if manners could soften the act of writing a creature off. The tension is that the speaker’s tone is breezy and playful, but the content is a clean dismissal: the rhino is not merely unattractive; he is not worth looking at.

The invented word that makes the insult feel harmless

Nash’s closing move—less prepoceros—turns rejection into a pun, inventing a nonsense adjective that echoes rhinoceros and makes the cruelty sound silly rather than mean. The invented word is the poem’s alibi: it invites us to laugh at sound and rhyme, not at an animal being judged. And yet the logic remains intact: the speaker will stare at something else, implying that attention is conditional, and that the rhino loses simply by being himself.