Verse yet
It is only fitting that cricket should have inspired as much poetry as it has
Suresh Menon
22-Jun-2008
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The most famous lines of poetry in cricket literature were written by Francis Thompson. These harked back to a match he had watched two decades earlier, between his favourite Lancashire and Gloucestershire, and contained the refrain "As the run-stealers flicker to and fro, / To and fro / O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!"
Thompson gave up the study of medicine to write poetry of a spiritual nature, occasionally indulging in light verse about cricket, and a parody of Edward Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam. He was 47 when he died in 1907. Poets of the game owe him, much as the prose writers owe Neville Cardus.
Interestingly, the first reports of cricket matches were written in verse (to call them poetry would be stretching it), often in Latin. The "reporters" of the early 18th century turned to heroic verse to describe heroic events. The pioneer was William Goldwin, a headmaster of Bristol Grammar School, whose match report - the first ever - in Latin verses appeared in 1706. There is no mention of scores, but the uncertainty over laws is highlighted. The match took place 300 years ago, probably on 30 April 1704. Four decades later James Love's "Cricket: A Heroic Poem" in rhyming couplets described a match between Kent and All England, and raised the bar.
The first anthology, The Book of Cricket Verse, however, was published only half a century ago, by Gerald Brodribb. More recently The Cricketer's Companion, edited by Alan Ross, contains some of the more enduring poetry, where the emphasis is on the writing rather than on the event or personality written about.
Among the best known poems on cricket is one written by Arthur Conan Doyle, who expresses his joy at capturing the wicket of WG Grace. It begins, "Once in my heyday of cricket, / Oh day I shall ever recall! I captured that glorious wicket, / The greatest, the grandest of all.
Others who have seen rhyme and reason in what players do include Edmund Blunden, EBV Christian ("Shall I never storm or swear / Just because the umpire's fair? / Or from expletives forbear, / 'Cause he gives me out with care? / If he will not favour me, / What care I how fair he be?), Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, AP Herbert, EV Lucas, Raymond Robertson-Glasgow (the delightful "One-way Critic" among others), John Arlott, Alan Ross, Siegfried Sassoon and John Betjeman. AA Milne published For the Luncheon Interval, a book of cricket verse in 1925.
The game lends itself to evocative poetry, as do the moral values imposed on it by writers. But the finest and most touching poems are about the players. John Arlott's tribute to Jack Hobbs on his seventieth birthday, reads in part:
"There was a wisdom so informed your bat
To understanding of the bowler's trade
That each resource of strength or skill he used
Seemed but the context of the stroke you played.
The Master: records prove the title good;
Yet figures fail you, for they cannot say
How many men whose names you never knew
Are proud to tell their sons they saw you play ... "
It is difficult to top that, although the following picture painted by Alan Ross in "Test Match at Lord's" is hard to beat since it describes so many elements in so concise a manner:
"Bailey bowling, MacLean cuts him late for one.
I walk from the Long Room into slanting sun.
Two ancients halt as Statham starts his run.
Then, elbows linked, but straight as sailors
On a tilting deck, they move. One, square-shouldered as a tailor's
Model, leans over, whispering in the other's ear:
'Go easy. Steps here. This end bowling.'
Turning, I watch Barnes guide Rhodes into fresher air,
As if to continue an innings, though Rhodes may only
Play by ear."
Thompson's poem, however, is the most referred to, parodied and quoted of all cricket poems. It is a tribute to nostalgia, and one that can be made contemporary by substituting the names of Barlow and Hornby with those of Sobers and Kanhai, or Gavaskar and Viswanath, or Richards and Pollock - the permutations are endless. And that is its magic.
Suresh Menon is a writer based in Bangalore. This article was first published in Wisden Asia Cricket magazine in 2004