The Wasp

The Wasp - meaning Summary

Comic Dread of Wasps

Nash’s short poem presents a speaker’s comic aversion to wasps, declaring them a major calamity and distrusting their open nests as false hospitality. The tone is playful and hyperbolic, turning a common insect encounter into exaggerated fear. The poem compresses this reaction into a neat, epigrammatic couplet, making a lighthearted statement about human irritation and the instinct to read hostile intent into nature’s behavior.