Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to comm...and their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The language of the game is interesting. You can think of the pauses as caesuras, breaks between the lines. As a poem the game is ...composed of a number of short lines representing the pitches. The number of lines per batter form a stanza. Then there is a space. Sometimes the stanzas become breathless, rushing full paragraphs that build rapidly on each other until the poem-inning explodes. The poem lives for this sudden blossoming out of prosodic regularity. Should someone make a computer analysis of baseball prosody, I believe that they would come up with something close to the prosody of some great American lyrical epic, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, let's say, or Doc Williams's Patterson.... The game is definitely an epic ... formed of many lyrical moments dependent on silences for their effectiveness. An unfolding story punctuated by brief emotional swellings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In middle life each man wrote a long elegiac work centering on the death of someone very near his heart: Tennyson's In Memoriam su...rely corresponds to Brahms' German Requiem.... At the other extreme you will no doubt think of Brahms' fiery Hungarian dances and graceful Viennese waltzes: in the work of Tennyson there are similar pieces, in broad dialect with touches of rough comedy and unbuttoned jollity, in particular "The Northern Farmer." Between these extremes, in the work of each man, lies a single masterpiece, strange but characteristic. Tennyson's Maud is what he calls a monodrama, a set of lyrics spoken by one man, telling the story of tragic love. In 1869 Brahms lost the beautiful Julie Schumann: the result was his famous Alto Rhapsody, an extended lyric, in fact a monodrama on the agonies of loneliness in a heart thirsty for love. The nineteenth century was a nationalist era, so both Brahms and Tennyson wrote pieces we should now call jingoistic: they are seldom played or read today, but they are part of the total picture. For Brahms the best known was his Triumph Song, written after the German conquests of France. For Tennyson, it was "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and other galloping and shouting lyrics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Firmness yclept in heroes, kings and seamen, That is, when they succeed; but greatly blamed... As obstinacy, both in men and women, Whene'er their triumph pales, or star is tamed -- And 'twill perplex the casuist in morality To fix the due bounds of this dangerous quality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moving finger writes; and having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit... Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, There of the last harvest sowed the seed,... And what the first morning of creation wrote, The last dawn of reckoning shall read.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learned to stray;... Along the cool sequestered vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »