15.THIS IS GOING TO HURT JUST A LITTLE BIT

 "This Is Going to Hurt Just a Little Bit" by Ogden Nash is a humorous poem filled with exaggerations, puns, and metaphors. Here, the poet vividly describes the painful experience of sitting in a dentist's chair. The poet humorously considers sitting in the dentist's chair as the worst torture a person can endure. He highlights that while some tortures are physical and some are mental, dental torture combines both. The experience of sitting with one's mouth wide open and the jaw digging into the chest robs a person of their calmness, cheerfulness, and dignity. In the poem, the poet employs several comparisons to emphasize the discomfort. He compares his mouth to a road being repaired, with the dentist seemingly using noisy equipment like stone crushers, concrete mixers, drills, and steam rollers. The dentist is humorously compared to a bear, as they attack and suffocate the patient like a bear suffocating its prey. The poet humorously suggests that the dentist approaches him with a crowbar, adding to the exaggerated comedic effect. After the treatment, the patient sighs in relief, and the doctor concludes by polishing the teeth. The poem concludes with the doctor advising the patient to come back in three months for a follow-up check-up. The poet expresses a sense of frustration with the cycle of having to visit the dentist repeatedly. He perceives it as a vicious circle from which he can never escape. The irony lies in the fact that the purpose of visiting the dentist is to maintain good oral health and avoid further visits, but it ends up becoming an ongoing cyclical process. The comic effect in the poem is achieved through the use of exaggerations. The act of sitting in the dentist's chair is portrayed as something that could potentially alter the course of one's life. Puns and wordplay are prevalent throughout the poem, evident in word pairs such as mental-dental, polished-demolished, hope-hopen, and so on.