Bound to your bookseller, leap to your library,
Deluge your dealer with bakshish and bribary,
Lean on the counter and never say when,
Wodehouse and Wooster are with us again.
Flourish the fish-slice, your buttons unloosing,
Prepare for the fabulous browsing and sluicing,
And quote, til you’re known as the neighborhood nuisance,
The gems that illumine the browsance and sluicance.
Oh, fondle each gem, and after you quote it,
Kindly inform me just who wrote it.
Which came first, the egg or the rooster?
P.G.Wodehouse or Bertram Wooster?
I know hawk from handsaw, and Finn from Fiji,
But I can’t disentangle Bertram from PG.
I inquire in the school room, I ask in the road house,
Did Wodehouse write Wooster, or Wooster Wodehouse?
Bertram Wodehouse and PG Wooster,
They are linked in my mind like Simon and Schuster.
No matter which fumbled in ’41,
Or which the woebegone figure of fun.
I deduce how the faux pas came about,
It was clearly Jeeves’s afternoon out.
Now Jeeves is back, and my cheeks are crumply
From watching him glide through Steeple Bumpleigh.
(Illustration courtesy Suvarna Sanyal, a retired banker who has an eye and an ear for all there is to see, listen to and laugh at in this world.)
ashokbhatia 
Thanks for posting this poem – I really enjoyed it.
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My pleasure, too!
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Wodehouse and Ogden Nash, two of my favorites! I think Wodehouse would have appreciated “browsance”, “sluicance”, and “useter”.
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Quite likely, possibly, indubitably!
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And now my cheeks too are crumply. Thanks!
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Welcome!
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What a wonderful meeting! I love PGW and I love Ogden Nash. After an hour or so with either, I stop and pinch my cheeks because they are crumply and aching with the continual smiling and chuckling and laughing. Thank you Ashok ji. Thank you.
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Brilliant. Thanks for sharing.
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Thank you!
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Neil Midkiff commented through Facebook: Does everyone realize that this was published in a newspaper as a book review when “Joy in the Morning” came out in 1946? I think it was the New York Herald Tribune, but I’d have to check my library for the source and date.
This helps explain some of the lines, such as the mention of Steeple Bumpleigh and the “fumbled in ’41” (referring to the broadcasts over the German radio). “With us again” is because this was the first Wodehouse novel since “Money in the Bank” in 1942 and the first Jeeves and Wooster book since “The Code of the Woosters” in 1938.
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Flourish the fish-slice… Genius.
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