Cricket – The Good Reader

As the cricket season comes to an end, it’s an appropriate time to look at one of the most famous of all cricket poems, At Lord’s by Francis Thompson (1859–1907).

The lines quoted below are actually the opening and closing verses of a longer poem, but they have become well-known in their shorter form.

For non-cricketers, Lord’s in London is regarded as the home of cricket and the red rose is the symbol of Lancashire.

The poem is as much about nostalgia and the passing of time as cricket, so perhaps it’s not a surprise to find out it was written near the end of Francis Thompson’s life.

At Lord’s by Francis Thompson

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro: –
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

I found Old Man at a Cricket Match by Norman Nicholson (1914–1987) online almost by chance. I had never heard of this fine poet, but a little research reveals that he lived almost all of his life in the town of Millom in Cumbria, where he was born.

He was not part of any poetic trend, movement or literary “school”, although he was influenced in his depiction of the northern landscape by W H Auden. He had no real connection with the London literary world, although he was published by Faber. I suspect that, like a few other poets, he might have been discovered and encouraged by T S Eliot.

He seems to me to be the poetic equivalent of the kind of painter who is dismissed with a sneer as “provincial”. But as Robert Frost put it: “In order to be universal, you must first be provincial”. I think Nicholson’s poetry deserves to be much more widely known.

I like the vivid imagery in this poem and the slightly unusual use of language, the word “mending” perhaps being part of the local dialect.

I’m not quite sure when the poem was written. I’ve seen it dated 1956, and I believe it was included in Nicholson’s 1972 collection, A Local Habitation, which takes its title from lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “. . . .and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”

Old Man at a Cricket Match by Norman Nicholson

‘It’s mending worse,’ he said,
             Bending west his head,
Strands of anxiety ravelled like old rope,
     Skitter of rain on the scorer’s shed
                 His only hope.

             Seven down for forty-five,
             Catches like stings from a hive,
And every man on the boundary appealing —
     An evening when it’s bad to be alive,
                 And the swifts squealing.

             Yet without boo or curse
             He waits leg-break or hearse,
Obedient in each to law and letter —
     Life and the weather mending worse,
                 Or worsening better.

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