My mother taught me to swim before I could walk. This was sensible. We had a swimming pool in the garden, unfenced of course, a sun-glittered temptation to a small child crawling over spiky grass on a hot day.

Swimming, tennis, netball, rowing, squash… sport has always been a part of my life. It taught me to play by the rules, absorb the pressures of competition, survive the grim lessons of humiliation and defeat. Through practice and repetition I gradually developed muscle memory, so that movement and coordination became ever more instinctive. I learned to relish the sheer joy of cleaving through water like a dolphin, the exhilaration of a hard-fought squash match, the triumphant exhaustion of pushing my body to its limits.

For the most part, sport stayed where it belonged –– in the pool or on the playing fields, on courts or in gym halls, or on the lakes where I used to row, surrounded by trees and granite-strewn hills. Rarely did sport stray into our schoolbooks: a maths question about the trajectory of a ball, perhaps, or a poem with an incomprehensible opening:

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night—
Ten to make and the match to win—
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.

Each stanza of Sir Henry Newbolt’s Vitaï Lampada concluded with the exhortation, so odd to our southern African schoolgirl ears, to 

‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

When I was growing up, cricket was not considered to be a suitable sport for girls (nor, for that matter, were football or rugby), and I knew very little about the game. It was only much later, through my sons, that I began to familiarise myself with cricket and learned to appreciate its unique combination of subtle nuance and brute force (and at last I was able to make sense of Newbolt’s opening lines). Perhaps it is the most poetic of sports. Certainly, there is a wide repertoire of cricket literature, including Siegfried Sassoon’s sublime description of The Flower Show Match in his autobiographical novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Some fine recent examples of cricket poetry include Kit Wright’s The Roller in the Woods and Zaffar Kunial’s Six. 

Somewhat more accessible to my schoolgirl self was John Betjeman’s deliciously erotic A Subaltern’s Love Song, extolling the delights of tennis (and other things):

Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn,
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament - you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.

The poem bounds merrily along with the deceptive effortlessness of great craftsmanship. We barely notice the poetic constraints: the tight aabb rhyme scheme within each quatrain, for example, or the iambic metre driving us through the narrative at whirlwind pace towards the immensely satisfying conclusion. 

Top athletic performances are similarly characterised by deceptive effortlessness. Former professional tennis player Stefan Edberg’s command of the serve-and-volley was notable not only for the elegance and efficiency of his technique, but for his apparently uncanny ability to be in exactly the right position to put away his opponent’s return. Gymnast Simone Biles combines power, balance, and artistic grace with exceptional spatial awareness to give the impression in her routines that she has a different relationship to gravity from the rest of us. Ali Farag, the current men’s number one squash player, uses his reach, anticipation and optimal footwork to dominate the centre of the court (the “T”) with seemingly unhurried ease.

Great athletes like Edberg, Biles and Farag push the boundaries of what can be achieved within the constraints – rules, equipment, arena of play – of their chosen sport.

Great poets push the boundaries of what can be achieved within the constraints – sounds, rhythm, form, layout, meaning – of words arranged on a page.

In poetry and in sport, successive generations build on the discoveries of their predecessors. The twelfth century Occitan troubadour Arnaut Daniel invented the sestina, a form whose creative possibilities have been explored by writers ranging from Dante and Petrarch to Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney, and which has inspired several variations. Among these are Swinburne’s rhyming double sestina The Complaint of Lisa; the pentina, created by Leigh Harrison; and the tritina, which was invented by Marie Ponsot.

As poets, we develop our poetic muscle memory through reading, writing, experimenting, playing with words and forms and images.

Constrained poetic forms can provide an apt framework for poems about sport. David Cohen has written several Scrabblegrams on sporting themes, including tributes to Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan. Each vignette is a beautiful demonstration of Cohen’s ability to exploit the space within the boundaries of constraint, just as his subjects did. (If you’ve not come across the concept of a Scrabblegram before, it’s a message or poem that uses each of the 100 tiles of the board game Scrabble exactly once.)

One of my favourite constrained poetry books on a sporting theme is Chris Kerr’s visual poetry sequence Extra Long Matches, which was inspired by the longest tennis match in history, between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon in 2010. Kerr uses arrangements of matchsticks to guide us through the first and last game of the contest, which lasted an extraordinary eleven hours and five minutes, ending 70-68 in the fifth set, and which contributed to a decision to change the tournament rules as of 2019. Kerr’s take on this memorable tennis match is witty and elegant – by the end of his book, the matchsticks are burnt out, as were the two players, and the umpire!

The simplest, most memorable, and perhaps most pleasing of all poems about sport is also the first one I learned:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

With its repetitions, rhythm, rhyme and cheerful musicality, this much-loved nursery rhyme encapsulates why sport is so beneficial for our well-being. It perfectly expresses the exhilaration and fun of rowing, as well as the joy of being fully present in the moment. Row, row, row, your boat was first published in 1852, and over the years there have been many variations, some of which you can read here (when they were little, my children particularly loved the one about the large giraffe in the bath).

David Cohen has written a charming Scrabblegram version of the rhyme, while you can read my own Fibonacci take on it here.

In a world that seems to be growing daily grimmer, we need more poems that extol beauty, pleasure, exercise, and a sense of fun. We need more sports poems!

Selected Reading:

David Cohen, Scrabblegrams (Penteract Press, December 2023)

Chris Kerr, Extra Long Matches (Penteract Press, September 2022)

Zaffar Kunial, England’s Green (Faber & Faber, 2022) – layered, resonant, beautifully crafted poems, many of which have a cricket theme.

Matthew Stewart, Whatever you do, just don’t (HappenStance Press, 2023) – includes a section of finely observed poems featuring Aldershot FC footballers from the eighties.