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"Speeding Ball Is Flung" Poem Appears -- Some Think Melville Wrote It

Salience	Peripheral
Tags	Ball in the Culture, Pre-modern RulesBall in the Culture, Pre-modern Rules
Location
City/State/Country:	Owego, NY?, United States
Modern Address
Game	Unnamed plugging gameUnnamed plugging game
Immediacy of Report	Contemporary
Age of Players	JuvenileJuvenile
Holiday
Notables
Text	And now hurrah! for the speeding ball Is flung in viewless air, And where it will strike in its rapid fall The boys are hastening there-- And the parted lip and the eager eye Are following its descent, Whilst the baffl'd stumbler's falling cry With th'exulting shout is blent. The leader now of either band Picks cautiously his men, And the quickest foot and the roughest hand Are what he chooses then. And see! the ball with swift rebound, Flies from the swinging bat, While the player spurns the beaten ground, Nor heeds his wind-caught hat. But the ball is stopp'd in its quick career, And is sent with a well-aim'd fling, And he dodges to feel it whistling near, Or leaps at its sudden sting, Whilst the shot is hail'd with a hearty shout, As the wounded one stops short, For his 'side' by the luckless blow is out-- And the others wait their sport.
Sources	This poem, published pseudonymously as the work of "William M. Christy" in 1844, is Melville's first published work, according to  Melville scholar Jeanne C. Howes, author of a monograph entitled Poet of a Morning: Herman Melville and the 'Redburn Poem' -- Redburn (2000): Or the Schoolmaster of a Morning. From a 19cbb post by John Thorn, July 6, 2004.  See also John's 2012 commentary at  https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/whitman-melville-and-baseball-662f5ef3583d.
Warning	There remains some question about Melville's authorship.   See Supplemental Material, below by Stephen Hoy and Mark Pestana.
Comment	In 2000, Jeanne C. Howes published Poet of a Morning: Herman Melville and the "Redburn" Poem.   The online blurb for this work states:  "In a tour de force of literary detection and scholarship, Jeanne Howes has conclusively proven that shortly after Herman Melville’s return from the South Pacific in 1844 an anonymous book published in Manhattan, Redburn: or the Schoolmaster of a Morning, is his first book. Early scholars pondered whether this book might have been written by Melville but dismissed it since not enough was then known about Melville’s life and writings. Serious scholarship did not begin until the 1920s, as Herman Melville, the great dark god of American letters had fallen into an obscurity so encompassing that at the time of his death in 1891 he was entirely forgotten by the literary community." A further annotation: "Possibly written about a game played by the schoolboys attending Sykes District School in Pittsfield where Melville, as an 18 year old taught for a short while before he went to sea." He shipped out in 1841.   Edit with form to add a comment
Query	Further opinions about this poem's description of a baserunning game with plugging are welcome. Mark Pestana's 2020 responses to four Protoball queries about the verse: [1] What is the author depicting in the opening lines? My guess: The boys, having decided to play ball, allow one of their company (perhaps the owner of the ball itself) to fling it in the air as far as he can, after which they all run toward it, watching its course across the sky (“And where it will strike in its rapid fall, The boys are hastening there—“), and the first to reach the ball gets first choice of players, as subsequently described (“The leader now of either band Picks cautiously his men”). Speculation, of course, but it’s the sort of haphazard rule that boys are wont to come up with. Or, perhaps the order of choosing is already determined, and the initial “fling” is merely a kind of ceremonial first pitch, thrown toward the playing field where they all run to begin play. [2] Can we have any confidence that this was a New England (Pittsfield MA has been suggested) or an upstate New York game? The poem itself is clearly set in Upstate NY – as per the opening lines: “Close where Tioga's hill-side fires / Smoke, dull, above Owego's spires,/ On a sweet stream whose silvery tide / Swells the broad Susquehannah's pride” [3] Should it be dated 1844 or 1845? 1845 is mentioned as publication date in a couple of instances, but the New York Spectator of December 18, 1844, contains a review of the book, so I’d go with 1844. [4] Is it really clear that this poem specifies 1OSO (one-out-side-out) playing rules? Not absolutely, because the description of the play is compacted and we can assume that plenty of action is left out. But at the same time, the tone and clarity in the penultimate line (“For his 'side' by the luckless blow is out”) makes such an inference a comfortable one.     Edit with form to add a query
Source Image	[[Image:|left|thumb]]
External Number
Submitted by	John Thorn, Bob Tholkes,
Submission Note	JT: 19CBB post 7/6/2004; RJT posting of 2/12/2015
Has Supplemental Text	Yes

1845c.26 "Speeding Ball Is Flung" Poem Appears -- Some Think Melville Wrote It"

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Comments

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Supplemental Text

 

 

A] "In the case of the Redburn poem, a strong competing interpretation concludes that Herman Melville is not its author. I can't argue either side of Howes' hypothesis since I have not read her work, and I only have a couple hundred words of notes on the topic, but I think we all readily understand that the attribution of Melville as author of this four canto poem is not universally accepted."

--19cbb post by Stephen Hoy, July 6, 2004

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B] The Melville connection, though not all that pertinent to Protoball's world, may be intriguing enough to merit a few comments. Not having read Ms. Howes’ work, I can’t assess the strength of her argument in favor of the Melville attribution, but the evidence at hand gives serious doubt. The lines on ballplay come from a longer poem apparently about a schoolmaster named Redburn. Now, Melville did publish a book in 1849 called Redburn: His First Voyage, but that was in prose and clearly about a different Redburn, a sailor, and there is no indication of any connection beyond the surname employed in both works. Melville’s first certified publication, the novel Typee, came out in February 1846, under his own name, and one wonders why he would have anonymously published the Redburn poem (on a wholly different subject) just about a year earlier (December 1844). Redburn is decent, well-crafted verse, but differs greatly in tone from the dark and rough-hewn style of his later acknowledged poems.

A few words, too, on “William Christy,” supposedly a pseudonym for Melville. A William M. Christy, born in Philadelphia in 1820, established a stationery, lithography, and job printing firm in that city in the late 1840s. He was at one time an editor for Godey’s Lady’s Book, a magazine in which Edgar Allan Poe published several short stories in the 1840s. Christy died in 1866 but his sons still operated his business almost to the turn of the century. The Redburn Schoolmaster poem was published in book form by a William M. Christy of Astor House in New York City in 1845. In a Genealogy Bank search, the latest sign of the NY Christy is December 1844, in a brief review of the Redburn poem. While no author is specified, Christy is indicated as publisher. The earliest sign of the Philadelphia Christy (Gen Bank again) is July 1847. It’s possible Christy began his career in New York and returned to his native city later - the dates of the search results would bear this out. It’s possible, too, that there were publishers of the same name in both cities. At any rate, it’s a mistake to label Christy as a Melville pseudonym; he was clearly the publisher of the poetic Redburn.

At any rate, the Redburn stanzas on what sounds like early baseball or town ball, are decent enough verse, and paint a pretty effective picture of a fast-moving game requiring skill & strategy. This piece should be better known! 

-- Mark Pestana, email of January 9, 2020.