Casey at the Bat

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1888

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s subtitle defines the poem’s form: “A Ballad of the Republic.” The ballad form itself traces its roots to Medieval Europe when traveling minstrels would perform story-songs set to catchy melodies and to beats immediately inviting to an audience. Poetry was more theater. The intention of ballads was to entertain large companies of listeners using grand action-oriented plots, usually involving national heroes or figures from the myths and legends of Antiquity. Ballads used their larger-than-life heroes to teach tidy lessons about living a moral life, themes uncomplicated by irony or nuance. Here, for instance, the story of Casey’s strikeout would teach the danger of pride as Casey gets his long-overdue comeuppance.

To help appeal to a general reader, then, the form is reliable, regular, and apparent. “Casey” is executed in 13 (the number itself is a harbinger of Casey’s doom and Mudville’s misfortune) four-line stanzas, or quatrains. The rhyme scheme is clean and evident, each quatrain using two rhyming couplets.

The lines themselves are unusually long. They are self-contained; most of the lines move toward closing punctuation that is often a period but sometimes a semi-colon. That would make for tedious recitation. But the drama of the baseball game showdown is created by frequent breaks (known as caesuras) that create a dramatic pause in the middle of the lines. Sometimes that pause is created by punctuation; sometimes the pause comes naturally from the action itself.

Thus, the poem invites public recitation because it allows for a variety of interpretations, both tragic and comic, Casey as both the fallen hero and the silly buffoon.

Meter

“Casey at the Bat” is a story poem. Given Thayer’s homage to the ballad genre, “Casey at the Bat” maintains a percussive and deliberate meter that helps create and control suspense as the story itself unfolds.

Each line uses the conventional two stress du-DUM unit typical of ballad poetry. The lines usually work with six such two-beat units, although there is some variation to prevent a singsong feel. That two-beat unit, the first unstressed, the second stressed, mimics conversation itself. Thus, the lines feel unforced, the meter feels natural despite being carefully structured. That metered feel is further enhanced by Thayer’s use of alliteration, the repeating of initial sound in words in the same line. In addition, Thayer sometimes repeats the same word at the beginning of successive lines—the repeated use of “the” in the first stanza, for instance, and “somewhere” in the closing stanza.

This ballad meter and these language devices invite recitation and allow for interpretative freedom at the discretion of the reader/reciter.

Tone

Thayer understands what the fans and Casey himself do not: This game is one of a season of games; very soon, the Mudville team, and Casey, will suit up for yet another game.

Disparity exists between what the fans, with their hyperbolic emotional reactions, and Casey himself, with his larger-than-life preening, experience. This disparity underscores what Thayer understands and creates a mocking seriocomic tone to the poem. The poem indulges exaggerated emotions to reflect the angst that sports fans experience, mimicking that sense of every-game-is-the-end-of-the-world import. In turn, even as Casey’s at-bat takes on cosmic importance, the poem undercuts that sense of exaggeration. The cheers for Casey, for instance, “rumbled through the valley” and “rattle[d] in the dell” and “pounded on the mountain” (Lines 18-19). The “roar” that greets the first called strike shakes the stadium like “the storm-waves” on an ocean shore (Line 35). Casey’s final swing—the last out in an entirely meaningless game—shatters the very air.

That sense of playful mockery is further underscored by the poem’s juxtaposition of elevated rhetoric and the solemn diction of tragic literature—“pall-like silence” (Line 4) or “the hope that springs eternal in the human breast” (Line 6) or “the stricken multitude” (Line 11) or “leather-covered sphere” (Line 29)—against the informal slang of the day—Flynn as a “lulu” and Blake as a “cake” (Line 10), or the chant “Kill him! Kill the umpire” (Line 35). This juxtaposition creates the poem’s tongue-in-cheek mock-heroic tone. In the end, it is just a game. If tragic literature traditionally valorizes the great achievements of its larger-than-life heroes, Thayer uses the same genre and same tone to chronicle the failure of a deeply flawed all-too-human anti-hero.