Poem of the Week 2024/13

The Pitcher

His art is eccentricity, his aim

How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,

His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He

Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,

But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate

Making the batter understand too late.

– Robert Francis

Here's a poem for this week's opening of the 2024 baseball season.

As the poet analyzes the skills involved in throwing a baseball towards a hitter, it's implicit (the second word of the poem is art) that he's describing not just a particular skill in a particular sport, but the requirements for a poet, or indeed anyone involved in some sort of creative work, even creative works that aren't always seen as such, like cooking. He's avoiding the obvious, while still moving towards a particular point; he wants to be misunderstood (or obscure) but only with the goal of ultimate clarity.

I particularly like the line breaks in this poem. In the first one, aim / aim at, the words echo, with a slight variation: the at gives focus to the aim, as we move from aim in the sense of his goal to aim in the sense of the particular point in space at which he is aiming – a subtle redirection that exemplifies the technique the poet is describing.

In the second couplet, we have passion balanced & supplemented in the next line by technique. The second word, technique, is how the first word is enacted. The end words (obvious / avoidance) reinforce each other; avoidance of the obvious is the aim, & it's important that he varies the methods, before they too become expected & obvious.

In the third couplet, the others who throw to be comprehended would be the other players on the pitcher's team; if you're playing outfield or on one of the bases, you want your throw to your teammates to be perfectly clear, so that you can get the all-important out of the opposing player. Comprehended usually refers to take something in & fully understanding it mentally, so beyond just realizing where the ball is headed, it includes understanding why the ball is headed there & where it needs to happen, & of course the word suggests also the skills involved in reading a poem, or appreciating any other work of artistry. He (the pitcher) teeters at the end of the first line, separated from the others even though they are his teammates; perhaps this isolation leads him to be, in his own mind, misunderstood, even though that is his aim (but misunderstood only for a moment).

The fourth couplet describes the limits within the pitcher's artistic misdirection must work. The errant / arrant combo is a bit of flashy wordplay, part of the music & play of language that makes poetry appealing. The words are linked in origin & were used interchangeably until the past few centuries, when their paths split, with errant meaning "behaving wrongly, straying outside the proper path or bounds, or moving about aimlessly or irregularly" & arrant meaning "being notoriously without moderation" (definitions come from Merriam-Webster's on-line dictionary). Both words are a bit antique (like the sport of baseball), & tend to be used in literary contexts more than everyday speech. (Errant even has a medieval whiff to it, as it brings to mind a knight-errant.) Any such throw is to be avoided in this context, along with anything else too wild; & the wild / willed line ends, with their close verbal echo & adjustment, move from what the throw should not be (wild) to what it should be (willed, that is, controlled by the pitcher / artist).

The final couplet, with its halting, complicated syntax, throws us a bit of a curveball. Not to communicate while communicating: this is the indirection of a great pitcher, or a poet, who speaks deeper or evanescent truths through metaphor (as Dickinson noted, "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant"). In the middle of the line still is repeated. Still is a powerful word. It moves in both time & space: time as it indicates continuing on-going action & space as it indicates a state of being motionless. It also indicates a sort of quiet & calm – an oasis in the middle of the physical & psychological & technical battle between pitcher & hitter. It's a freighted word, one with ambiguous meanings. The final line clarifies the first line in the couplet, & indeed sums up the point of the poem: the batter will understand the pitcher's intent, but only when it's too late for him to parry it with a successful hit. So far the end words have played off each other, but in the penultimate couplet, wild / willed, we have our first example of lines ending with a slant rhyme. The poem culminates with the end words communicate / too late, giving us as the finale, for the first time in this poem, the satisfying verbal chime of an exact rhyme.

I took this poem from Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems, edited by Gabriel Fried.