The Sunset Years Of Samuel Shy - Analysis

Wanting to be chosen, not merely included

Ogden Nash gives Samuel Shy a complaint that sounds petty until it starts to ache: he has become kissable only after kisses no longer matter. The speaker opens with a mock-heroic shrug at destiny—Master I may be, But not of my fate—and then aims his real grievance at time. Now come the kisses, he says, but they arrive too many too late. The central bitterness isn’t that he lacked pleasure in youth; it’s that he lacked the specific proof of being desired. The poem circles one question like a sore tooth: Where were these kisses three decades ago?

The catalog of girls as a catalog of missed permission

The long list of women—Mint julep girls, beer girls, headstrong career girls, Debs cosmopolitan, matrons suburbulent—creates a crowded social world in which Shy was present but untouched. Nash’s comedy (those quick labels, those rhyming piles) actually sharpens the loneliness: there were plenty of opportunities, plenty of scenes, plenty of types. He even expands the circle into the intimate and the taboo—The girls of my friends and the wives of my friends—as if to say he was constantly near romance and constantly excluded from it. The most cutting moment is how small the desired act is. Not love, not marriage, not sex—just: Not even Jenny Once kissed me. Naming one woman makes the absence feel personal, not theoretical.

The turn: kisses become a social reflex

Midway through, the poem flips from hunger to saturation. These very same girls, now older, freely relax with a head on my shoulder, and suddenly kisses arrive A flood in full spate. That watery image matters: a flood is abundant but indiscriminate. Shy calls them meaningless kisses, and the word meaningless is the real injury—these gestures aren’t recognition of his particular self; they’re what people do when they’ve crossed into a certain age and set of manners. Even kindness becomes depersonalizing when it is automatic.

Hello, goodbye, bridge, wakes: intimacy without intimacy

Nash underlines the insult by attaching kisses to trivial triggers: They kiss me hello, They kiss me goodbye, and even offering a cigarette earns a kiss for reply. Kisses land everywhere—at weddings, at wakes, at cocktails, at bridge—until the gesture loses any connection to feeling. The speaker’s comparison, like slapping a midge, is deliberately ugly: the kiss becomes a flick of habit, a motion performed without attention. And when he says the sound is loud in my ears Like the locusts that return every seventeen years, he turns affection into an infestation—periodic, noisy, unstoppable, and not at all tender.

A body that can’t cash the check of affection

The final section brings the body forward: I'm arthritic, dyspeptic, Potentially ulcery. It’s funny in Nash’s way—one ailment stacked on another—but it also clarifies the tragedy. The kisses arrive when his body is least capable of receiving them as pleasure, and when the social meaning of the kiss has thinned into custom. He calls them kisses by custom compulsory, and that phrase exposes the poem’s deepest tension: Shy wanted the freedom of desire, but he is being given the obligation of politeness. Even his fear of being institutionalized—commit me as senile demential—is framed as an outcome of this emptiness, as if perfunctory affection could help erase a person rather than comfort him.

The Parcae, and the cruel timing of consolation

By addressing the Parcae—the Fates who measure and cut life—Shy turns a social complaint into a metaphysical one. His repeated question, Answer, O Parcae, is not really about kisses; it’s about why consolation arrives only once it can no longer repair what was missed. The poem’s sting is that time doesn’t merely take youth away; it changes what gestures mean. A kiss at twenty might have been a risk, a confession, a choice. A kiss in the sunset years is often a ritual. Shy isn’t asking for more affection—he has plenty—he’s asking for the one thing fate won’t give back: the moment when affection would have been evidence that he mattered.

One uncomfortable implication sits inside the joke: Shy’s complaint depends on the idea that the only kisses that count are the ones that certify his attractiveness while he’s young. When he calls the later kisses inconsequential, he may be telling the truth about their hollowness—but he may also be revealing how little he trusts any tenderness that isn’t erotic or exclusive. The poem leaves you balancing sympathy for his regret against the suspicion that he has trained himself to recognize love only in the form that time most reliably withholds.