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

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 21, 2023

39 sec read
151

Quick analysis:

Scheme XA BC DB EB AF XF BX XB AX EG GH XX XB CA BB BB HD AX
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 740
Words 133
Stanzas 18
Stanza Lengths 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2

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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