The Moon Is Shining Bright As Day

by Ogden Nash, Rose Shirvanian (Illustrator)

Moon is Shining

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Frederic Ogden Nash was an American poet well known for his light verse. At the time of his death in 1971, the New York Times said his "droll verse with its unconventional rhymes made him the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry".

Reviews

[Rena Sherwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cute but sometimes tedious collection of poems for kids. Well, kids living in America in the early 1950s, anyway. I discovered many that were familiar to me, but most of these I had never read before (and for good reasons.) Quite a lot of poems had to do with death, suffering and war. I keep forgetting that kids like violent stuff reading material. We have this misconception that kids like reading fluffy bunny stuff and we liked that stuff when we were kids but kids are not like that.



Although there are some selections from Nash, he mainly functioned as the editor, title-come-upper and introduction writer. I wonder how many of these poems would make modern-day kids fall asleep. There are many words and situations described which have nothing to do with modern life.

Sadly, the illustrations were pretty bad and mostly did not match the text they were paired with. Anyway, here's the cover:

[Delaney States · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am giving this book two stars because some of the poems were of high quality and some of them were not. I also think this book is outdated for the time period we live in. I did choose this book because I think it would be a good introductory book to poems.

[Zoii Vogt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found a couple of poems that I liked throughout the sections. The sections feel unorganized and some of the poems are talking about life before the 20th century. There are a few ill-mannered words.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books where the whole is decidedly not greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, if anything, this is somewhat less than its constituent poems should be. The Moon is Shining Bright as Day is a collection of light nonsense and children's poems compiled by Ogden Nash. It, as he says in his introduction, contains poems that "gave [him] pleasure as a boy" or "were introduced to [him] by [his] children". As such, it contains a wonderful assortment of great pieces, along with a few that just don't resonate here and now, in my individual life. Robert Louis Stevenson and Emily Dickinson are frequent names, including her "Hope is the thing with feathers" (one of my favorites). I was underwhelmed by poems like "Daniel Boone" and "Robin Hood and Allin a Dale", but these by no means made up the majority of the text included. There was one odd inclusion, the first of T. S. Eliot's "Preludes", but, I suppose, with the right spin it could be seen as "good-humored verse", Mr. Nash's stated definition for the poems included in this anthology. There were also a few pieces that I was finally forced to read, such as "The Yarn of the Nancy Bell", which, for one reason or another I have always avoided. I was not as impressed by some of those as I had hoped, but it was good to finally read them. Overall, the poems were generally good; exemplary pieces of "good-humored" verse, both silly and serious, but all with a level of gentle friendliness.
What held the collection back was mostly in the assembly and a few poems. Some poems grew tiresome quite rapidly--these usually had trite rhyme schemes and either excessively regular or nonsensically irregular meter. "Daniel Boone" is an example of the first type, and all the inclusions by Carl Sandburg were of the final. Other irregular pieces (unlike Sandburg, who I have come to realize I don't particularly like) are simply badly metered; they feel as though they want to be metrically regular, they certainly resemble neither contemporary nor Whitman-esque free verse in rhythm, but end up jumping around and suddenly having a single line that breaks the meter that you have previously been worked so hard into following. One of these is John Townsend Trowbridge's "Evening on the Farm" where the the flow of

In the polar tree, above the spring,
The katydid begin to sing;
The early dews are falling.
Into the stone-heap darts the mink;
The swallow skims the river's brink;
And home to the woodland fly the crows,
When over the hill the farm-boy goes,
Cheerily calling,
" Co' boss! co' boss! co'! co'1 co'!"

This pattern repeats, so I suppose that is a kind of rhythm, but I could not make heads nor tails of how that line was supposed to fit into the sound of the poem. The other problem with this book is one of assembly. There was, simply, no genius in selection or organization--I already knew most poems I liked, and the pieces were grouped into roughly defined thematic sections. I'm still not sure what the final section's theme was supposed to be. As a result, this anthology containing many widely recognized pieces among the best of this sort of poetry became a weak reading experience that did little other than provide another chance to read poems I already have scattered throughout other volumes. The five-star poems make it worthwhile, but it is better as a book to browse through in search of favorite poems and maybe even read a few new ones than an anthology even remotely to be "read" as a whole work (less so even than many).

[Loralie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful book of poetry written in the 1950's. Cracked mine open again over the weekend. Loved them!