The Crowd at the Ball Game
The Crowd at the Ball Game - meaning Summary
Beauty in Useless Spectacle
Williams portrays a baseball crowd whose shared delight in fleeting, purposeless moments—chases, errors, flashes of genius—creates a kind of collective beauty that is both attractive and menacing. The poem treats this aesthetic idleness as a social force: it ennobles and warns, making faces and gestures into persistent, potentially violent powers. The scene is summer solstice simplicity turned into a public, communal condition of intense, thoughtless attention.
Read Complete AnalysesThe 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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