Verity -- Drummond Allison

Guest poem submitted by Aseem Kaul.
Who'd have thought the world would have so many cricket poems in it?

(Poem #952) Verity (In memory of Captain Hedley Verity, injured in Sicily, Taken POW, buried at Caserta. Pre-war, Yorkshire and England slow left-arm bowler.) The ruth and truth you taught have come full-circle On that fell island all whose history lies, Far now from Bramhall Lane and far from Scarborough You recollect how foolish are the wise. On this great ground more marvellous than Lord's - Time takes more spin than nineteen thirty four - You face at last that vast that Bradman-shaming Batsman whose cuts obey no natural law. Run up again, as gravely smile as ever, Veer without fear your left unlucky arm In His so dark direction, but no length However lovely can disturb the harm That is His style, defer the winning drive Or shake the crowd from their uproarious calm. -- Drummond Allison

 What I find wonderful about this poem is that it's perhaps the only poem
I've ever read which treats cricket as a sombre subject (witness the poems
run so far in this theme - all of which have an element of humour). The
starting, of course, is a bit weak, and the use of the sonnet form somewhat
unnecessary, but I truly love the last six lines, with their sense of heroic
determination - the sort of courage that makes a man give all he has against
an implacable foe and an unconcerned crowd. I know nothing of Verity (and am
not particularly fond of cricket) but reading this poem, I have no choice
but to admire him - as a cricketer and a human being.

Aseem.

[Verity Bio]

A wonderfully gifted left-arm spin bowler, Hedley Verity was born in the
shadow of Headingley in 1905 and died from his wounds in a prisoner-of-war
hospital camp in Caserta, Italy, during the Second World War at the age of
38. It was a tragic end to a life that had given so much to the world of
cricket.

It seems strange to think that Verity was originally turned down by
Yorkshire at trials in 1926, but he was eventually given a chance by the
county in 1930 and, of course, became a fixture until the start of the war.
He was the natural successor to that other great Yorkshire left-arm spinner,
Wilfred Rhodes, whose career drew to a close in 1930 after an amazing 883
games for the county. Verity was never going to get close - Hitler saw to
that - but he did turn out for Yorkshire 278 times and in that time he
produced some remarkable bowling analyses.

In 1931 he took ten for 36 off 18.4 overs against Warwickshire at Leeds, but
incredibly he bettered these figures the following season by taking ten for
ten in 19.4 overs against Nottinghamshire, also at Headingley. They remain
the county's best bowling figures for an innings while Verity's 17 for 91
against Essex at Leyton in 1933 remain Yorkshire's best bowling in a match.
Verity claimed nine wickets in an innings seven times for Yorkshire. He took
100 wickets in a season nine times and took 200 wickets in three consecutive
seasons between 1935-37. He ended with 1,956 first-class wickets at an
average of 14.9, took five wickets in an innings 164 times and ten wickets
in a match 54 times. On 1 September, 1939, in the last first-class match
before war was declared, he took seven for nine at Hove against Sussex.

The year after he first appeared for Yorkshire, Verity made his England
debut against New Zealand at The Oval, finishing the game with four wickets.
After that summer he was ignored until 1932/33, the Bodyline Series, in
which he took 11 wickets, including Bradman twice. By the time his career
was over, Verity had dismissed Bradman ten times, a figure matched only by
Grimmett. As with his domestic career, Verity's international performances
threw up some astonishing bowling figures. He took eight for 43 and finished
with match figures of 15 for 104 against Australia at Lord's in 1934. His
stamina was demonstrated during the 1938-39 tour of South Africa when he
bowled 95.6 eight-ball overs in an innings at Durban, taking four for 184.
By the time war arrived, Verity had taken 144 wickets at 24.37.

During the war he was a captain in the Green Howards. He sustained his
wounds in the battle of Catania in Sicily and died on 31 July, 1943. His
grave is at Caserta Military Cemetery, some 16 miles from Naples. (Copyright
CricInfo 2001)

        -- www.cricinfo.com

Ironically, Drummond Allison was also killed in action during WW2...

Wife Poem -- Hayden Carruth

Guest poem submitted by Adam Gitner:

(Poem #951) Wife Poem And it's clear at last, she dropped down from the moon, not like some sylphy Cynthia at Delphi, after all she's not seventeen, but with the sexual grace and personal implacability of a goddess of our time; so he says to himself at night seeing the glow of her sleep in her half (two-thirds really) of their bed, the claire de lune of her shoulder and forehead behind the deep clouds of her hair. He drinks his wine and swallows more pills. The birds make their first aubade, little chirps and chitterings, and outside the first light mists their window. The day will be awful, nervy and dull and sullen. His last cigarette, his final gulp of chardonnay, and he presses against her warm glow, thinking of how he swam as a boy of twelve in the warm pond beyond the elms and hickories at the meadow's edge. He turned like a sleepy carp among the water lilies, under the dragonflies and hot clouds of the old days of summer. -- Hayden Carruth

You've run Carruth before and here as usual is his particular New England
maturity. He's such a technician with the lines; one hand continually
pulling you forward, the other deftly assembling the landscape. In another
poem "Ray" he compares the poetic mind to a bucket of minnows. If they are
minnows he's slapping together on this poem, it's some shellac that holds
them together. Though there's no consistent meter I can tell, there's an
abiding if intangible sense of poetic rhythm. Lines tend to lapse into iambs
but slip out of hand too quickly to hold. Other lines have an elusive rhyme,
as in how the words "sylphy Cynthia at Delphi" echo back to each other
softly reduced. Reduction is a key to this poem, as is the weakness of an
echo. The narrator seems to live in a world with the lights set permanently
on dim. His only display of strength is in a few lines that end in strong
iambs, like "she dropped", "His last", "a boy", "beyond", and "among" that
carry you over the enjambment and onto the next line. Yet even this give the
impression of the narrator's ultimate weakness in the way it mimics the
sound of a lame foot dragging only intermittently, or the rasp of a labored
breath heaving in the lungs then falling silent on the next line. It begs
comparison with the resolution of the meter in Tennyson's "Ulysses".

The moon, Diana, Cynthia, or Selene as Keats called her, hangs in the
backdrop of this poem and is frequently contrasted with the day: in imagery,
surely Carruth was aware of the juxtaposition of Delphi the center of
worship of Apollo with Cynthia; in form, the way the first and last half of
the poem are consumed with dreaming while the middle displays a shift in
diction to the concrete (cigarette, gulp of chardonnay, chirps, birds, and
first light). His wife is consistently identified with the moon from the
initial simile, to the "claire de lune" of her shoulder, and the "clouds" of
her hair. I can only assume that the poet is familiar with Keats' previous
treatment of the Moon falling in love with the shepherd Endymion in his epic
of the same name. A quote from Bulfinch's _Mythology_ is relevant:

   "The story of Endymion has a peculiar charm from the human meaning which
it so thinly veils. We see in Endymion the young poet, his fancy and his
heart seeking in vain for that which can satisfy them, finding his favourite
hour in the quiet moonlight, and nursing there beneath the beams of the
bright and silent witness the melancholy and the ardour which consume him.
The story suggests aspiring and poetic love, a life spent more in dreams
than in reality, and an early and welcome death."
        -- ([broken link] http://www.bulfinch.org/fables/bull26.html).

To the narrator the night is the soft echo of day just as the dream is the
embrace opposite "nervy" reality. Our narrator lives in this wistful cocoon
which is not a cocoon as should precede maturity but one that slips on long
after. It verges on inexpressible for me to describe how Carruth brings out
the similarities between dreamy adolescence and dreamy old age, moving
between night and day with the effort of a brushstroke or how the end comes
not with the ringing tone of a rhyming couplet or the beating finality of
consistent meter but with a simple, falling trochee.

 - Adam Gitner

[Minstrels Links]

Hayden Carruth:
Poem #684, Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey
Poem #774, Ray

John Keats:
Poem #12, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
Poem #182, La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Poem #316, Ode to a Nightingale
Poem #433, Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell
Poem #575, To Mrs Reynolds' Cat
Poem #696, Last Sonnet
Poem #770, A Thing of Beauty is a Joy for Ever
Poem #910, On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
Poem #15, The Eagle (a fragment)
Poem #31, Break, break, break
Poem #80, The Brook (excerpt)
Poem #121, Ulysses
Poem #355, Charge of the Light Brigade
Poem #653, Ring Out, Wild Bells
Poem #825, Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White
Poem #852, Mariana in the Moated Grange
Poem #896, The Kraken

The cricket sang -- Emily Dickinson

Not cricket? You decide...

(Poem #950) The cricket sang The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,-- A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,-- And so the night became. -- Emily Dickinson

One of Dickinson's many impressive poetic talents is the ability to write in
a wonderfully and deliberately quirky style, and yet not have that
quirkiness become the focus of the poem, or overshadow its more 'poetic'
aspects. Today's poem doesn't *quite* succeed in that particular regard -
the convoluted syntax is obtrusive, and forces several readings of the poem,
but that is not necessarily a bad thing, and indeed, the poem itself is
quite beautiful, packing several layers of imagery into a few
precisely-chosen words.

The images themselves are original and evocative (and sometimes even both
<g>) - the cricket singing the sun into setting (compare Thomas's "wild men
who caught and sang the sun in flight"), the workmen seaming[1] up the day,
the startlingly apt comparison in the second verse, and the unoriginal but
very well executed last verse.

Note, too, the deceptively regular-seeming verse, both in terms of metrical
structure and rhyme. Particularly impressive is how well the short first
verse blends into the longer (by a whole line[2]) second and third verses,
though the varying rhyme scheme is handled perfectly too.

[1] though I am unable to decide quite what Dickinson intended here - there
is the obvious sense of stitching, but the OED also gives "Agric. A furrow,
(seed) drill.", and the more I think about it, the more appropriate a usage
it seems in context.
[2] if you count lines one and two as a single, broken line

Links:

  Set to music by Ernst Bacon:
    [broken link] http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/d/dickinson/cricket.html

  Biography:
    Poem #92

  Dickinson poems on Minstrels:
    Poem #92, "There's a certain Slant of light"
    Poem #174, "A Route of Evanescence"
    Poem #341, "The Grass so little has to do -"
    Poem #458, "The Chariot"
    Poem #529, "If you were coming in the fall"
    Poem #580, "Split the Lark"
    Poem #687, "Success is counted sweetest"
    Poem #711, "I'm Nobody! Who are you?"
    Poem #829, "It dropped so low in my regard"
    Poem #871, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"
    Poem #891, "A Doubt If It Be Us"

  And the cricket theme:
    Poem #946, Sir Henry Newbolt, "Vitai Lampada"
    Poem #947, John Kendal, "Ballad of a Homeless Bat"
    Poem #948, Julia A. Moore, "Grand Rapids Cricket Club"
    Poem #949, Andrew Lang, "Brahma"

-martin

Brahma -- Andrew Lang

The poem that inspired this week's theme, suggested by Suresh
Ramasubramanian:

(Poem #949) Brahma If the wild bowler thinks he bowls, Or if the batsman thinks he's bowled, They know not, poor misguided souls, They too shall perish unconsoled. I am the batsman and the bat, I am the bowler and the ball, The umpire, the pavilion cat, The roller, pitch, and stumps, and all. -- Andrew Lang

Here's the original:

 "Brahma"

 If the red slayer think he slays,
   Or if the slain think he is slain,
 They know not well the subtle ways
   I keep, and pass, and turn again.

 Far or forgot to me is near;
   Shadow and sunlight are the same;
 The vanish'd gods to me appear;
   And one to me are shame and fame.

 They reckon ill who leave me out;
   When me they fly, I am the wings;
 I am the doubter and the doubt,
   And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

 The strong gods pine for my abode,
   And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
 But thou, meek lover of the good!
   Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

        -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a kinder, gentler world, you might easily have seen Emerson's "Brahma"
featuring on the Minstrels in its own right. It's a fairly straightforward
meditation, phrased with a confidence worthy of an all-encompassing Being;
it captures the idea of Brahma succinctly, and with greater accuracy than
most philosophical treatises; and it has its share of memorable lines
(especially the first and sixth couplets).

Alas, it was not to be. Not after Andrew Lang worked his magic, at any rate.
The easiest poem to parody is one that takes itself too seriously [1], and
Emerson's "Brahma" falls headlong into this trap. It's a decent enough poem,
but it's unbearably pompous, and Lang skewers this pomposity with relish.
His "Brahma" is irreverent, surreal, and joyful; he transforms the original
from the sublime to the ridiculous, and then transcends it.

thomas.

[1] Actually, most egregiously bad poems (whether or not they're susceptible
to parody) do tend to take themselves too seriously; it's their defining
feature. The unforgettable [2] works of Julia Moore and William McGonagall
are prime examples of this fact; their immortality stems as much from their
creators' earnestness as from their own ghastliness.

Of course, one must take care not to reverse the syllogism; it is entirely
possible for a poem to take itself seriously without being a crime against
the language. I would even go so far as to put "Brahma" (the original, that
is) into this category; it's not a bad poem per se; it's just that the
parody is so much better...

[2] Word chosen with the utmost of care :)

[Minstrels Links]

This week's theme is Cricket:
Poem #946, Vitai Lampada -- Sir Henry Newbolt
Poem #947, Ballad of a Homeless Bat -- John Kendal
Poem #948, Grand Rapids Cricket Club -- Julia A. Moore
Poem #949, Brahma -- Andrew Lang
Poem #686, Nicholas Cricket -- Joyce Maxner

Two wonderfully bad poets:
Poem #948, Grand Rapids Cricket Club -- Julia A. Moore
Poem #343, The Tay Bridge Disaster  -- William McGonagall

Grand Rapids Cricket Club -- Julia A Moore

Carrying on with the cricket theme...

(Poem #948) Grand Rapids Cricket Club In Grand Rapids is a handsome club, Of men that cricket play, As fine a set of skillful men That can their skill display. They are the champions of the West, They think they are quite fine, They've won a hundred honors well; It is their most cunning design. Brave Kelso, he's considered great, Chief of the club he is found; Great crowds he draws to see him bowl The ball upon the ground. And Mr. Follet is very brave, A lighter player than the rest, He got struck severe at the fair ground For which he took a rest. When Mr. Dennis does well play, His courage is full great, And accidents to him occur, But not much, though, of late. This ball play is a dangerous game, Brave knights to play it though; Those boys would be the nation's pride, If they to war would go. From Milwaukee their club did come, With thoughts of skill at play, But beat they was, and then went home -- Had nothing more to say. Grand Rapids club that cricket play, Will soon be known afar, Much prouder do the members stand, Like many a noble star. -- Julia A Moore

What can one say about a magnificent effort like today's?

    "Longfellow at his best wrote nothing like that."
    "I agree with you."

           -- Saki, "Reginald's Peace Poem"

Well, Moore herself has provided an apt description...

  All those which speak of being killed, died or drowned, are truthful
  songs; others are "more truth than poetry."

         -- Julia Moore, Preface to "The Sweet Singer of Michigan"

As have the editors of "The Stuffed Owl"...

  And she adds, defending herself against these evil men, that "Literary is
  a work very difficult to do," and that poetry from the heart has more
  power than poetry from the head.

         -- D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, "The Stuffed Owl: An
         Anthology of Bad Verse" on Moore

Though as Moore says

   And now kind friends, what I have wrote,
   I hope you will pass o'er,
   And not criticise as some have done,
   Hitherto herebefore

         -- Julia Moore, "The Author's Early Life"

However, criticism is what we are all about, so let us examine today's poem
in greater detail. And a most rewarding poem it is too - all the heroism and
the travails of the brave men of the Grand Rapids Cricket Club are brought
touchingly and vividly to life, and the well-deserved victory over the
upstarts from Milwaukee is passed over with masterful understatement. Note,
too, the bold use of syntactic inversions, daring eye-rhymes and charmingly
varied scansion. What from a lesser poet would be mere poetry gets turned in
Moore's hands into immortal Doggerel to which the word 'mere' doesn't even
begin to apply.

Links:

  Seamus Cooney has a wonderful Julia Moore site, which is well worth
  exploring, and from which all the quotations other than the Saki one were
  taken:
    [broken link] http://www.wmich.edu/english/txt/Moore/

  And, incredible as it may seem, Moore is thoroughly eclipsed by the great
  William McGonagall:
    Poem #343, William McGonagall, "The Tay Bridge Disaster"

  Here's some more delightfully bad poetry:
    [broken link] http://www.wmich.edu/english/tchg/lit/pms/bad/index.html

  And the Cricket theme thus far:
    Poem #946, Sir Henry Newbolt, "Vitaï Lampada"
    Poem #947, John Kendal, "Ballad of a Homeless Bat"

Afterthought:

  'Tis an ill wind...

     [Nash's] rhymes are jarringly off or disconcertingly exact, and his
     ragged stanzas vary from lines of one word to lines that meander the
     length of a paragraph, often interrupted by inapposite digressions. He
     said he learned his prosody from the unintentional blunders of the
     notoriously slipshod poet Julia Moore, the "Sweet Singer of Michigan."

             -- EB on Ogden Nash

-martin