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The “Rubaiyat’s” Contribution to Golf Poetry

January 25, 2010 by 1 Comment

To write a parody of a poem, you would take the basic characteristics of the verse (for example, its rhyming scheme and basic idea) and then rework them for comic or ironic effect.

Now suppose that you are a young golfer and poet around the turn of the 20th century. Being literate, you are aware that Omar Khayyam’s poem, Rubaiyat, is being parodied left and right. So one day, after being around the golf course until early evening, you pick up a copy of the poem (it was easy to do then). Reading through the verses, you are struck by the stanza 27,

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
.     About it and about;  but evermore
Came out by the same Door where in I went.

If your name was Henry Boynton, a graduate of Amherst with a Masters of Arts, then, looking at the stanza you might have thought about all the controversies regarding the fundamental of golf being discussed by golfers such as Jamie Anderson and Jamie Braid and all the other Jamies of the time. And this might have led you to write (as part of a book, The Golfer’s Rubaiyat),

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Jamie and His, and heard great argument
.     Of Grip and Stance and Swing; but evermore
Found at the Exit but a Dollar spent.

Little did Boynton know, but he himself would be parodied by later golfing poets.

In the July 1910 issue of  The American Golfer, a poet named Jack Warbasse wrote,

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Travis and Braid, and read great argument
.     About the Grip and Stance; but evermore
Play’d out by the same Stump where in I went.

And then in 1919, a Scottish writer, poet and drama critic Robert K. Risk published a book of collected poems, Songs of the Links, that included the poem “The Golfaiyat of Dufar Hy-Yam.” In that poem we have,

Myself when you did eagerly frequent,
Club-makers’ Shops, and heard great Argument
.     Of Grip and Stance and Swing; but evermore
Learned and Bought little I did not repent.

Finally, in 1946, J. A. Hammerton, a Scottish statesman and author, published a book, The Rubiayat of a Golfer, in which he wrote,

Myself when young would hopefully frequent
Where Pros and Plus Men had great argument
.     On Grips that overlapped, on Swing and Stance
But came away less hopeful than I went.

So what have we learned? First, that there are limits to the golfing parodies of stanza 27 of the Rubaiyat. And second, Instruction about grip, stance and swing has been confusing for a long time!

Filed Under: golf, golf history, golf humor, golf instruction, golf poetry, golf poetry books, humor, poetry, Scotland, sports poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Links Between Golf and Life

January 18, 2010 by 1 Comment

Robert Chambers was a Scottish author, poet, journal editor and publisher, born in 1802. He was the anonymous author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844  and described as bringing together,

“various ideas of stellar evolution and progressive transmutation of species governed by God-given laws in an accessible narrative which tied together numerous speculative scientific theories of the age. ” (from Wikipedia)

Chambers, who was also a golfer, wrote a number of other books including one titled, A Few Rambling Remarks on Golf. Also, he and his brother William for many years edited CHAMBER’S JOURNAL of POPULAR LITERATURE,L SCIENCE, AND ART. One entry in 1877 titled “The Royal Game of Golf” included the following,

The fascinations of the game have enlisted in the ranks of its votaries men of all classes, many of them famous on other fields, who have made their reminiscences of their beloved pursuit mediums for many a bright word-picture in prose and verse.

Robert Chambers was clearly one of these men.

Late in his life, Chambers moved to St. Andrews where he enjoyed a “luxurious and  ‘learned leisure.’ All task-work was at an end.” While living in the shadows of the Old Course, Chambers envisioned a series of “half-comic, half-moralizing sonnets, which were intended to be nine in number,” one for each of the first nine holes. He completed only three before he died in 1871. However, his son and a friend added the other six. The entire poem, “The Nine Holes of St. Andrews in a Series of Sonnets” can be found in Robert Clark’s book Golf: A Royal and Ancient Game. Below is the first hole sonnet written by Robert Chambers.

I. THE FIRST OR BRIDGE HOLE.

Sacred to hope and promise is the spot —
To  Philp’s and to the Union Parlour- near,
To every golfer, every caddie dear —
Where we strike off — oh, ne’er to be forgot.
Although in lands most distant we sojourn.
But not without its perils is the place ;
Mark the opposing caddie’s  sly grimace,
Whispering :”‘He’s on the road !”  “He’s in the burn !”

So is it often in the grander game
Of life, when, eager, hoping for the palm,
Breathing of honour, joy, and love, and fame,
Conscious of nothing like a doubt or qualm.
We start, and cry :  “Salute us, muse of fire !”
And the first footstep lands us in the mire.

[Philp was Hugh Philp a still famous club maker with a shop near the first hole and the Union Parlour was the clubhouse at the time.]

Filed Under: golf, golf history, golf humor, golf poetry, humor, poetry, Scotland, sports poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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Lost Golf Balls

January 11, 2010 by 2 Comments

A recent story of the CNN website describes lost golf balls as “humanity’s signature litter.” The article begins,

Research teams at the Danish Golf Union have discovered it takes between 100 to 1,000 years for a golf ball to decompose naturally. A startling fact when it is also estimated 300 million balls are lost or discarded in the United States alone, every year. It seems the simple plastic golf ball is increasingly becoming a major litter problem.

Some balls, of course, are recovered. Many are washed, repackaged and sold on eBay, or other sites such as lostgolfballs.com.

To help golfers find their lost balls, two nuclear scientists, apparently in their off hours, have invented ball-finding glasses. According to website, visiballusa.com,

Visiball Golf Ball Finding Glasses have become golf’s must have accessory, with more than 250,000 golfers saving time, money, strokes and frustration. Developed and patented by two nuclear scientists, Visiball Golf Ball Finding Glasses incorporate special optical filters that make white objects appear to glow.

But I’m most impressed with Natalie Rogers’ lament, titled “It’s a Shame,” that appeared in the March 1966 issue of Golf Magazine.

It’s a Shame

We live in an age of computers and space ships,
With daily a new guided missile,
But why doesn’t someone invent a golf ball
That will come from the woods when you whistle”

Now there’s a real challenge for those two nuclear scientists.


Filed Under: golf, golf balls, golf humor, golf poetry, humor, poetry, sports poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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Twines — Two Line Golf Poems from Twitter

January 4, 2010 by 2 Comments

Last year I “joined” Twitter to publicize this Blog. I started by tweeting announcements of each new Post. But then I began thinking about golf poetry and Twitter. Since Tweets are limited to 140 characters, I concluded that Twitter poems would have to be short,  [Tw]o-l[ine] verses. Thus, the birth of the Twitter Twine.

So in early November, I started putting Golf Twines on Twitter from time to time. In case you missed some or all of them, here are the better ones (in my opinion):

Firs,t a Twine that describes the Blog:

Golf Course of Rhymes, where stories are told,
The prose mostly current, the poetry old.

A Twine about Michelle Wie tweeted just before she won her first LPGA tournament.

A Wie win,
Would be big.

And it was.

A Boston Twine that is even more meaningful with six inches of snow on the ground.

Golf and Winter, total frustration,
Unless you are living far south of South Station!

And here are a couple of Twines that I did not write.

From tee to green he may reap the crop —
But what’s the use when his putts won’t drop. (Grantland Rice)

There’s many a man now swinging a club,
Who ought to be mowing a lawn. (W. H. Webling)

And here are a few more that I wrote.

Had Tiger come clean before being hounded,
Could he have escaped without being pounded?

A loud guy riding and smoking a stogie,
Is not my first choice to beat Colonel Bogey.

If at first you don’t succeed,
Golf’s for you, it’s guaranteed!

Please consider a comment or a Golf Twine of your own below.

Filed Under: golf, golf humor, golf poetry, Golf Twines, humor, poetry, sports poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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Golf Poetry for a Winter’s Day

December 28, 2009 by 1 Comment



Winter has arrived. We got about 10 inches of snow not long ago. It is melting now, but surely more is on the way. Also, in a few days, both the year and the decade end. It is definitely time to look back, time for retrospection.

Retrospection is, in fact, what W. Hastings Webling (1866 – 1946?), a Canadian writer and poet, wrote about in verses published in the magazine Golf in January 1915. Though he was only looking back to the last golf season, and though some of his words are dated, the sentiments he expresses still ring true.

I hope you will enjoy reading the poem even though it’s long. But if you fear a long poem as much as a short putt, at least read the first, second to last and last stanzas. And please feel free to share any thoughts you have about Webling’s poem or more generally about golf poetry.

RETROSPECTION

by Hastings Webling

The days are short, the winds are chill,
The turf has lost its verdant hue,
And those who played the good old game
Have slowly disappeared from view.
No longer may we watch the flight
Of golf balls as they gaily soar,
Or hear the chaff of merry wit,
Or echo of some lusty “Fore!”

Ah, well! we cannot all expect
To play the game from year to year;
To hike, like some, to southern climes
And play in balmy atmosphere.
‘Tis better so; for we can rest
And reminisce, while fancy free,
Recall the games of yesterday,
Defeats, and proud-won victory.

And we can sit around the fire
And dream of things we might have done;
Of matches that we thought a cinch
And cups that well might we have won;
And then those scores of “seventy eight,”
Only missed by some short putt,
It all will tend to stimulate
Our fond desire for future luck.

And as to “birdies”—well might I
Write of these in doleful tone;
For they have caused such deep distress
More than I would like to own.
Ah! oft I held them in my grasp
With joy to think how well they’d pay
When someone “holes a ten-foot putt”
And swift my “birdie” flies away.

But such is life, and so is golf,
The things we think so really sure;
The holes we count before they’re won
Are apt to give us one guess more.
But, after all, it is for this
We seek the prizes that may be,
And find the charm both in the game
And in its great uncertainty.

My boy! if skies were ever fair,
If winds should always favor you,
And all your “lies” were perfect “lies,”
And all your putts were straight and true—
If all your drives were far and sure,
Approaches on the green were “dead,”
The joy of combat would be lost
And vict’rys charm forever shed.

Filed Under: golf, golf history, golf humor, golf poetry, humor, poetry, sports poetry Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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The Golfpoet’s Take on Tiger

December 21, 2009 by 3 Comments

This Post marks the beginning of the second year of Golf Course of Rhymes. I would like to thank all of my fellow bloggers who have made their readers aware of this site. And most of all I would like to thank all of my readers who have logged more than 17,000 page views in the first year. And who said, “Golf poetry?”

To begin year two, I offer a poetic parody on the golf story of the year. The original, “Casey at the Bat,” can be found at the Poetry Foundation site.

Tiger on the Mat
(With thanks and
apologies to Ernest
Lawrence Thayer)

The outlook isn’t brilliant for the Pro Golf Tour this year;
At least at the beginning, there’ll be one less pro to cheer.
No his name it isn’t Casey, but he’s known to be a swinger,
And his story much like Casey’s must be classed as one humdinger!

[Skipping the 10 stanzas that tell Tiger’s sad story which you already
know (or think you know), we move to the last eight lines.]

The smile is gone from Tiger’s face, his teeth banged up from hate,
Was he pounded with cruel violence, a club upon his plate?
And now his sponsors keep their cash as he has dropped the ball,
And now the golf world’s shattered by the length of Tiger’s fall.

Oh, somewhere on a golf course, the sun is shinning bright;
A foursome’s playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere dubs are laughing, and somewhere “fore” is shouted;
But there is no joy in Vedra-ville – mighty Tiger has been outed.

by the Golfpoet (Leon S. White)

Filed Under: golf, golf history, golf humor, golf poetry, humor, poetry, sports poetry, Tiger Woods Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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A Golf Poem with a Moral

December 14, 2009 by Leave a Comment

If there is one quality that separates golf from other sports it is emphasis on playing by the rules. A player is expected to call a penalty on him or herself when a rule is broken even if no other player is aware of the infraction. And, of course, it is expected that a player’s scorecard includes all the strokes played. And then there are the players who go out alone. James P. Hughes wrote about one of these players in his poem, “Individual Golf,” published in the December 1915 issue of The American Golfer.

INDIVIDUAL GOLF

He stood upon the link’s first tee
And made a straight and perfect drive.
His iron he sliced around a tree,
Dead to the pin. Instead of five
He holed a single putt for three.

Another perfect shot was made—
Two hundred fifty yards or more.
A midiron with a lofted blade
He used to help his medal score,
For with it dead, the ball he laid.

Two threes he had to start the round.
Next came a short and well trapped hole.
His drive, a cleek, rose from the ground
Straight for the green and on the pole
He holed a two with smile profound.

Thus went his game in less than par—
A record for all time, you guess.
No hook nor slice his score to mar;
No balls in rough all down  in less
Than almost nothing—there you are.

No, gentle golfer, ’twas no dream
In which this magic score was  made,
Although at first it so would seem
When former cards were cast in shade,
By this titanic play supreme.

But now the secret bare is shown
Of how these threes and fours were done.
Some putts, of course, he could disown—
In fact, he never claimed but one,
For this great golfer played alone.

Far greater than the best of clubs
Is one lone pencil in the hand—
It saves a hundred strokes to dubs
And proves a blessing in the land
Because it never counts the flubs.

Moral

When golfers tell of shots unknown,
Just ask them if they played alone.

Filed Under: golf, golf history, golf humor, golf poetry, humor, poetry, sports poetry Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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When Golf Poetry Matters

December 7, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Jerome Travers, the great amateur golfer of the early 20th century, included a chapter called “‘First Aid’ to a golfer ‘Off his Game,'” in his book Travers’ Golf Book ( New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913). He began, “What a note of tragedy there is in those few words “the golfer is off his game.” Travers went on to write,

The golfer ‘off his game’ cannot drive, approach or putt, he doesn’t know what the matter is and he has completely lost confidence in himself.

Travers’ prose gives us a straight forward description of what it is to be off one’s game in golf. However, it takes a poet to get to the essence of the problem and its ramifications.

In a book called Humors and Emotions of Golf (1905), a poet known only by the initials (E.M.B.) tells us what it’s really like when “He’s off his game.”

“He’s off his game.”

Like hollow echoes boding ill,
His heart is wild with tremors chill,
And whispers in a small voice still—
An admonition—ghostly—shrill—
.          “He’s off his game!”

His divots fly like night-bats doure;
His drives are never far and sure;
And bunkers, like Charybdis, lure
His erring ball to depths obscure;
.          “He’s off his game!”

In vain seem all the pro’s sage tips;
His little gutty always lips
Or over-runs the hole; then slips
That naughty D——I must ellipse,
.          He’s off his game!”

Thro’ distant whins and stubborn gorse
With grim expletives gaining force,
He plunges on his zig-zag course,
Until he sighs in deep remorse,
.          “I’m off my game!”

At home his brooding spirit shows
The weighty cares of hidden throes;
Too well his Golfing Widow knows
The anguish of her hubby’s woes—
.          “He’s off his game!”

Andrew Lang (1844-1912), a famous Scottish writer and poet as well as golfer, also wrote a poem of similar anguish called “Off my Game.” Could the agonies and frustrations of golf be fully described without poetry? I think not.

Filed Under: golf, golf history, golf humor, golf poetry, golf poetry books, humor, poetry, sports poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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Golf Poetry from the Captain of the Leven Thistle Golf Club, 1886

November 30, 2009 by 3 Comments

In last week’s Post, I included a poem from a book, Divots for Dubs. The book  can be found in only four libraries in the U.S. Last Monday, I received a book in the mail called Golf Songs and Recitations that I bought from a book seller in England. No libraries carry this book!

What I actually bought was a 1988 reproduction of the original which had been published first in 1886 and then printed again in 1895. This very small (6 1/2″ x 4″) 32 page “book” was written by David Jackson, then Captain of the Leven Thistle Golf Club.  In the book’s Introduction, Jackson says he composed the songs and verses in the book because he had,

heard very few Songs in honour of the Game, and [he] … often thought it a pity that such a popular recreation should be so little celebrated by the Poets.

The first poem in the book is called “Ode to Golf.” In it Jackson describes his love of golf in words that still resonate more than 120 years later. I am including the complete poem since I don’t believe you will find it any where else on the web or in any other book. I think you will enjoy it.

ODE TO GOLF

Oh, Golf, thou art a pleasure dear,
That cheers us on from year to year;
That soothes the heart, and cools the brain,
When stirred with grief, or seared with pain.
Whene’er the wintry snows are over,
Around the Greens we fondly hover;
All blythe of heart as busy bees,
We swing our Clubs, and seek our tees,
The smiling sea, the sunny sky,
The song of larks that heavenward fly,
The flowers that spring to meet the eye
Proclaim the Golfing season nigh.

To Swing, then Drive, To Putt, and Hole,
To some may seem absurd and droll;
To me it is a joy, a pride—
Worth twenty other games beside.
Where is the rival to the game
Of royal and of ancient fame;
Or what is such a cheery houff
As just a friendly match at Gouff?
And when at last, in good old age,
No more at Matches we’ll engage,
We’ll turn to memory’s page and fain
We’ll fight our battles ower again;
And leave to youth the active sport,
The miss, the drive, the miles, the short,
The sclaff, the foozle, the weel sent hame,
The ups and downs of this dear game.

Then fill a bumper, fill it high,
Hurrah for Golf, may Golf ne’er die,
But still from age to age increase—
A game of friendship, love, and peace!

Filed Under: golf, golf history, golf poetry, golf poetry books, golf songs, poetry, Scotland, sports poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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A Rare Golf Poetry Book

November 23, 2009 by Leave a Comment

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Those of you who have been following this blog know that most of the poetry is from old golf books and magazines. Part of the fun of writing the blog is finding new (old) books which provide me with new material.  Brian Siplo (co-author of a wonderful book about Harry Vardon’s first trip to the U. S., called The Vardon Invasion) recently told me about some old golf poetry books. With a bit of luck, I was able to buy one of them called Divots for Dubs through Abebooks. The 96 page book was written by J. Ellsworth Schrite who self-published it in 1934.

The book  explains in verse, how to play golf. The author makes this very clear in his charming introduction,

Divots for Dubs

“DIVOTS FOR DUBS” explains in verse,
How to play golf, better or worse;

The history, the course, the clubs to choose,
The stance to take, the swings to use;

What to wear, and where to look,
How to slice, and how to hook;

Things that on each course are seen,
Things you need to play “Nineteen”;

A bit of humor, a bit of sense,
Some alibis for self defence:

Get your “Divots”, take a look,
You miss a “par” if you miss the book.

If you want to read on, however, you will be challenged. According to WorldCat only four libraries in the world have it! But that’s also part of the fun I have: bringing inaccessible golf poetry back to life in this blog.

Filed Under: golf, golf history, golf humor, golf instruction, golf poetry, golf poetry books, humor, poetry, sports poetry Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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