Comparing There Is No Word For Goodbye And Casey At The Bat

Poetry is very different. We see this throughout the history of literature. But whether you’re reading Ballads or Concrete poems they all have one thing in common, they’re all poetry. The two poems ‘There Is No Word For Goodbye’ and ‘Casey At The Bat’ are examples of only two out of the five styles of poetry. Analyzing and comparing the two styles is difficult as it’s almost too different to compare. ‘There Is No Word For Goodbye’ is a poem by Mary Tall Mountain –for the purpose of this paper I’ll call her M&M for short- Her writing is an example of a concrete poem. A concrete poem has a shape that suggests its subject and the poet will arrange the letters, words, punctuation, and lines to create an image in the reader’s mind.

M&M’s poem doesn’t rhyme which adds to the serious tone of the story. Her poem tells us of a young woman who has lost her mother as she asks her aunt how they say goodbye. The structure of the poem has six stanzas each consisting of four or five lines. In her poem M&M expresses the wistfulness and sad tone of the story very well, as shown in the excerpt (and here I quote)
“A shade of feeling rippled the wind tanned skin. Ah, nothing, she said, watching the river flash.”
This is out of context but is after the part in which her niece asks her what the word for goodbye is in their native language, identifying the aunt as Native American. That particular stanza represents the wistfulness and grief of the aunt as she stares into the river while answering her niece. The first line meaning emotion showed on her face, in this case it would be grief or sorrow.
‘Casey At The Bat’ is a poem written by Ernest Lawrence Thayer -For the purposes of this paper he will be known as E.T- E.T’s poem is an example of a Ballad, A poem written with rhyming stanzas and four to six lines that feature repetition and a strong meter(or in other words it rhymes and has a good rhythm to it).Rhyming poetry is (in my opinion) harder to write as instead of having the entirety of the dictionary at your fingertips you are forced to choose words that sound alike, it takes a lot of mental effort to make it actually worth reading . E.T’s poem consists of thirteen stanzas each with four lines. The Rhyme scene is set as AABB making it a decent poem. This form of Rhyming makes for an upbeat and fast paced poem, an example of this being
“Then from the gladdened multitude went up a joyous yell- It rumbled in the mountaintops, it rattled in the dell; It struck upon the hillside and rebounded on the flat; For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.”
His emotions come out in the poem as being Upbeat and cheerful. (Caution spoilers ahead) Unfortunately at the end of E.T’s poem Casey strikes out and loses the game causing him to be scorned among the crowd. This is very different in contrast to M&M’s poem which was sad and wistful though both the different styles of E.T and M&M make for a wide difference in the world of poetry. M&M’s style is down to earth and serious whereas E.T’s was a fictitious story about a baseball game. M&M’s poem was better by far, the emotional depth and basing it on real life events made for a wonderful poem. E.T does deserve credit though for writing such an upbeat and cheerful poem with rhyming words, and accurately displaying the crowd’s emotions. M&M better explained her thoughts and emotions through her poem by using images such as “wise black pools of her eyes.” creating an pictures in the readers mind.