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Home ⇒ 💗William Carlos Williams ⇒ The Crowd At The Ball Game

The Crowd At The Ball Game

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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Poem The Crowd At The Ball Game - William Carlos Williams
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