Halloween Hoodlums: Go Home! By Ogden Nash

Comical tone is created with one-dimensional traits of characters. Nash is the cynical old man telling kids to get off his lawn, while kids play pranks. There is also mention of traditional Halloween. Despite needling rants, there is a hint of respect or jealousy towards youthful antics. Even if it is an irritated rant language is blunt making it is easy to smile, "These are my glummer thoughts, but I have others that are not so glum. One of which is that too often the only visible part of the pond of youth is the scum."

The main complaint to rouse interest creates a premise between Saints and All Saints Day (an alternative name for Halloween). This technique is typically associated to essays; however, the nuance of authority creates the image of an old man or parent giving a lecture. These slight nuances move imagery through various events without long, winding descriptions found in stories and novels.

The authoritative stance provides information that All Saint's Day is an adequate name. After all the saints rest for labors, they are woken on Halloween. Maintaining the personality, he quickly narrates away from this idea to describe how when he was a child they played dignified pranks. Youth of modern times are vandals after declaring an opinion of understanding. "Despite nostalgia that increases with age, I don't insist that new ways are decadent and only the old ways are fit to venerate." Expressing both sides of the story is another method of rhetoric commonly utilized in debates.

Providing several images of pranks and trick-or-treating, he states the "bump in the night" is a child not a ghoul. He might prefer a ghoul. Trick-or-treating is reduced to training children to extort people through threats. Then Nash implicates children as befuddling elderly, taking advantage of their innocence and fragility, "Although they will on occasion help an old lady to cross the street by propelling her with their elbows off the sidewalk and into the gutter."

To the bitter end, he refuses to make the obvious statement, declaring all days should be restful for saints. Awkwardly, the intensity and blunt nature of information transposes a bitter statement into a clever platform to express fun interactions between everyone young and old on Halloween. This is one of the best nostalgic poems for Halloween.

Quirky Books
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