Be glad your nose is on your face by Jack Prelutsky

Be glad your nose is on your face,not pasted on some other place,for if it were where it is not,you might dislike your nose a lot.

Imagine if your precious nosewere sandwiched in between your toes,that clearly would not be a treat,for you'd be forced to smell your feet.

Your nose would be a source of dreadwere it attached atop your head,it soon would drive you to despair,forever tickled by your hair.

Within your ear, your nose would bean absolute catastrophe,for when you were obliged to sneeze,your brain would rattle from the breeze.

Your nose, instead, through thick and thin,remains between your eyes and chin,not pasted on some other place--be glad your nose is on your face!

Prelutsky’s humorous ‘Be Glad Your Nose is on Your Face’, being aimed at children, follows the simplistic ABAB rhyme scheme, and using a simplistic lexis to follow suit. The message of the poem itself is also rather elementary; be grateful for what you have, and be aware that changing these things could bring about disastrous consequences.

Through using the nose as a metaphor for something that we have in our lives,Prelutsky is able to illustrate that if our noses were in any other place it would not benefit us at all. He describes our noses as being ‘precious’ and important, and humorously places it in the most peculiar places around the body; the feet, the head and the ear.

Prelutsky’s placing of the nose as being ‘sandwiched in between your toes’ evokes both an image of comedy and also discomfort at the thought of being ‘forced to smell your feet.’ This constant state of discomfort ultimately points out to the young reader – in a covert fashion of course – that changing the position of something so important could hold very irreversible consequences, so we should be grateful for the things we have got, and not seek out to change things that are perfectly good as they are.

Prelutsky’s poem shows the reader that it is sometimes easy to overlook some of the positive things in our lives, and it is also very easy to concentrate on the negative facets of these things. The desire to change things can often be overwhelming, but Prelutsky goes on to give further examples of the consequences of change. He claims that if our noses were on our heads then it ‘would drive [us] to despair, / forever tickled by [our] hair’, a parallel to the discomfort of positioning a nose between toes on the foot.

Everything in your life is a certain way for a reason, because it just wouldn’t be right if it was any other way. We should just be content and thankful for how our life is right now instead of always complaining and changing how we live.