A Tale Of The Thirteenth Floor
The hands of the clock were reaching high
In an old midtown hotel;
I name no name, but its sordid fame
Is table talk in hell.
I name no name, but hell's own flame
Illumes the lobby garish,
A gilded snare just off Times Square
For the maidens of the parish.
The revolving door swept the grimy floor
Like a crinoline grotesque,
And a lowly bum from an ancient slum
Crept furtively past the desk.
His footsteps sift into the lift
As a knife in the sheath is slipped,
Stealthy and swift into the lift
As a vampire into a crypt.
Old Maxie, the elevator boy,
Was reading an ode by Shelley,
But he dropped the ode as it were a toad
When the gun jammed into his belly.
There came a whisper as soft as mud
In the bed of an old canal:
"Take me up to the suite of Pinball Pete,
The rat who betrayed my gal."
The lift doth rise with groans and sighs
Like a duchess for the waltz,
Then in middle shaft, like a duchess daft,
It changes its mind and halts.
The bum bites lip as the landlocked ship
Doth neither fall nor rise,
But Maxie the elevator boy
Regards him with burning eyes.
"First, to explore the thirteenth floor,"
Says Maxie, "would be wise."
Quoth the bum, "There is moss on your double cross,
I have been this way before,
I have cased the joint at every point,
And there is no thirteenth floor.
The architect he skipped direct
From twelve unto fourteen,
There is twelve below and fourteen above,
And nothing in between,
For the vermin who dwell in this hotel
Could never abide thirteen."
Said Max, "Thirteen, that floor obscene,
Is hidden from human sight;
But once a year it doth appear,
On this Walpurgis Night.
Ere you peril your soul in murderer's role,
Heed those who sinned of yore;
The path they trod led away from God,
And onto the thirteenth floor,
Where those they slew, a grisly crew,
Reproach them forevermore.
"We are higher than twelve and below fourteen,"
Said Maxie to the bum,
"And the sickening draft that taints the shaft
Is a whiff of kingdom come.
The sickening draft that taints the shaft
Blows through the devil's door!"
And he squashed the latch like a fungus patch,
And revealed the thirteenth floor.
It was cheap cigars like lurid scars
That glowed in the rancid gloom,
The murk was a-boil with fusel oil
And the reek of stale perfume.
And round and round there dragged and wound
A loathsome conga chain,
The square and the hep in slow lock step,
The slayer and the slain.
(For the souls of the victims ascend on high,
But their bodies below remain.)
The clean souls fly to their home in the sky,
But their bodies remain below
To pursue the Cain who each has slain
And harry him to and fro.
When life is extinct each corpse is linked
To its gibbering murderer,
As a chicken is bound with wire around
The neck of a killer cur.
Handcuffed to Hate come Doctor Waite
(He tastes the poison now),
And Ruth and Judd and a head of blood
With horns upon its brow.
Up sashays Nan with her feathery fan
From Floradora bright;
She never hung for Caesar Young
But she's dancing with him tonight.
Here's the bulging hip and the foam-flecked lip
Of the mad dog, Vincent Coll,
And over there that ill-met pair,
Becker and Rosenthal,
Here's Legs and Dutch and a dozen such
Of braggart bullies and brutes,
And each one bends 'neath the weight of friends
Who are wearing concrete suits.
Now the damned make way for the double-damned
Who emerge with shuffling pace
From the nightmare zone of persons unknown,
With neither name nor face.
And poor Dot King to one doth cling,
Joined in a ghastly jig,
While Elwell doth jape at a goblin shape
And tickle it with his wig.
See Rothstein pass like breath on a glass,
The original Black Sox kid;
He riffles the pack, riding piggyback
On the killer whose name he hid.
And smeared like brine on a slavering swine,
Starr Faithful, once so fair,
Drawn from the sea to her debauchee,
With the salt sand in her hair.
And still they come, and from the bum
The icy sweat doth spray;
His white lips scream as in a dream,
"For God's sake, let's away!
If ever I meet with Pinball Pete
I will not seek his gore,
Lest a treadmill grim I must trudge with him
On the hideous thirteenth floor."
"For you I rejoice," said Maxie's voice,
"And I bid you go in peace,
But I am late for a dancing date
That nevermore will cease.
So remember, friend, as your way you wend,
That it would have happened to you,
But I turned the heat on Pinball Pete;
You see - I had a daughter, too!"
The bum reached out and he tried to shout,
But the door in his face was slammed,
And silent as stone he rode down alone
From the floor of the double-damned.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Ogden Nash turns a murder story into a wild, mock-epic descent through a haunted hotel elevator. A hard-bitten bum arrives at an old midtown hotel and is pulled into a strange confrontation with Maxie, the elevator boy, who seems to know both the building's hidden geography and the moral geography beneath it. What begins as a tense ride upward becomes a surreal revelation: the hotel contains a forbidden thirteenth floor, a place where killers are trapped in an endless procession with the people they destroyed.
The poem moves from comic crime-noir to supernatural judgment. The bum expects to reach the room of "Pinball Pete," but Maxie reveals that revenge is not the real issue; the real punishment is eternal companionship with one's victims. The final twist gives the poem its emotional center: Maxie's grim knowledge comes from personal loss, and his last line turns the grotesque spectacle into an act of bitter mercy. Beneath the verbal pyrotechnics, the poem weighs vengeance against justice, and private grief against cosmic retribution.
Theme
- Retribution and judgment - The thirteenth floor functions as a place where violent acts return to haunt the guilty, turning crime into a permanent sentence rather than a single event.
- Death and the afterlife - The poem imagines a grotesque version of the hereafter in which souls and bodies are separated, and punishment continues beyond physical death.
- Violence as entrapment - Murderers are not simply condemned; they are bound to the people they killed, suggesting that brutality creates its own inescapable cage.
- Grief beneath comic surfaces - Maxie's final revelation shows that the poem's humor masks genuine mourning and loss.
- Urban corruption - The hotel, with its garish lobby and criminal clientele, becomes a miniature city of vice where moral decay is built into the architecture.
- Justice versus revenge - The bum arrives ready for violent payback, but the poem redirects attention toward a harsher, more absolute form of punishment.
Literary Devices
- Parody - Nash borrows the lofty rhythms of ballad and Gothic horror, then stuffs them with slang, crime references, and comic exaggeration to create a playful but unsettling mock-epic.
- Rhyme and meter - The tightly managed rhyme gives the poem a singing, storybook momentum that contrasts sharply with the gruesome subject matter.
- Hyperbole - The hotel is described in extreme, over-the-top terms, enlarging ordinary vice into infernal spectacle.
- Allusion - References to Shelley, Walpurgis Night, and various notorious figures lend the poem a crowded cultural world and a deliberately elevated tone.
- Simile - Frequent comparisons, often absurd or startling, make the elevator ride and the damned procession feel both vivid and grotesque.
- Juxtaposition - Elegant diction sits beside underworld slang and criminal imagery, sharpening the poem's comic bite.
- Repetition - Repeated phrases about the thirteenth floor and the elevator's movement create a chant-like inevitability, as if the characters are trapped in a ritual.
Symbolism
- The thirteenth floor - It symbolizes hidden guilt, supernatural punishment, and the moral level that ordinary people try to deny exists.
- The elevator - The lift suggests a journey between moral states, moving the characters toward revelation rather than simple physical height.
- The hotel - The old hotel stands for a corrupt urban world where respectable surfaces conceal violence and vice.
- Maxie's reading of Shelley - The book hints at lost innocence or culture surviving inside a brutal environment, making Maxie's role more surprising and poignant.
- The conga chain - The endless dance of victims and killers symbolizes inescapable consequence and the grotesque continuity of crime.
- Concrete suits - The phrase evokes the dead weight of guilt and the way violent men are dragged down by what they have done.
Tone
Nash's tone is mischievous, sardonic, and theatrically knowing, as if he is enjoying every outrageous rhyme even while steering the poem toward a dark moral punchline. The mood for the reader, however, is far less playful: the comic momentum gives way to unease, then to eerie fascination, as the hidden floor fills with the haunting consequences of murder. By the end, the poem feels both entertaining and chilling, since its jokes never fully disguise the loneliness and sorrow behind the punishment.
Historical Context
Ogden Nash belongs to the American tradition of light verse, where wit, verbal invention, and formal control are used to handle serious or absurd subjects with apparent ease. His work often draws on popular culture, urban life, and comic exaggeration, and this poem reflects a broader twentieth-century taste for mixing high and low styles.
The poem also fits a wider literary fascination with noir crime, supernatural retribution, and the moral unease of city life. Its mock-ballad form recalls older storytelling traditions, but its references to modern urban vice and notorious criminal figures place it firmly in the culture of the twentieth-century metropolis, where newspaper crime stories and sensational urban legends helped shape the imagination.