Analysis of The Crowd At The Ball Game

William Carlos Williams 1883 (Rutherford) – 1963 (Rutherford)



The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them—

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius—

all to no end save beauty
the eternal—

So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

for this
to be warned against

saluted and defied—
It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly
its words cut—

The flashy female with her
mother, gets it—

The Jew gets it straight— it
is deadly, terrifying—

It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution

It is beauty itself
that lives

day by day in them
idly—

This is
the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail

permanently, seriously
without thought


Scheme XA BC DB EB AF XF BX XB AX EG GH XX XB CA BB BB HD AX
Poetic Form
Metre 011011 11100 101011 1011 1001001 101 0001010 01110 1111110 0010 1001101 1100 11 11101 010001 1101100 1110 111 010110 1011 011111 110100 1100100 010 111001 11 11101 10 11 0101110 111011010 011 1001110 001 10001000 011
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 740
Words 133
Sentences 1
Stanzas 18
Stanza Lengths 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2
Lines Amount 36
Letters per line (avg) 16
Words per line (avg) 4
Letters per stanza (avg) 31
Words per stanza (avg) 7
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 21, 2023

39 sec read
152

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was a Latino-American poet closely associated with modernism and imagism. more…

All William Carlos Williams poems | William Carlos Williams Books

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