As the title alone might suggest, David Baker’s “Old Man Throwing a Ball” offers warm,
welcoming images, feelings, and ideas about humans, dogs, and spring. We see many reasons to like being alive in spite of the poem's honest awareness of how temporal those images are. There's an impressive, homey dialectic here, about life and death, order and wildness, and I’m glad for the poem’s company even though I have more questions about word choice than I usually do in a poem I admire.
So, first, my reservations. Suspecting a typo for “lopes,” I
had to look up the verb “lop,” which can mean to droop or to move awkwardly. I
suspect it also plays on the more familiar “lope,” either of which could
describe the dog’s motion in a way that makes him attractive, lovable, and sympathetic.
At the end of the second stanza, I struggle with the
introduction of the old woman: “Now
his mother // dodders out, she’s old as the sky, wheeling / her green tank with
its sweet vein, breath.”
I think she’s the old man’s wife, but then why
“mother”? If the man is already
aged enough to stand “atilt” and earn the title of “old guy,” it seems unlikely
that his mother—literally, his mother, not a wife as surrogate mother—is the second human character. I realize
that some couples who’ve been married a long time refer to each other as
“mother” and “father,” but here it’s the speaker who’s using that term of
endearment, though he seems a stranger to both of the older people.
I wrestled for a long time with the old woman’s “wheel”ing of
a “green tank.” It must be an oxygen tank with its “sweet vein” of “breath,” but
I wonder if that image and action could have been clearer. Are all oxygen tanks
green? How many readers know that? Do all old women with oxygen tanks make a man
turn to his dog for love? If so, does that fact make us squirm some?
Despite some metrical irregularities--which are more desirable than a cadence with military or nursery-school regularity--the
poem walks by in a casual blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), so I wonder if Baker has forced some
word choice to fit the meter. But David Baker is an eminent and
contemporary poet; it seems unlikely he’d fall into that trap, so I’m trying to assume that any miscommunication is my fault.
I’m a little uneasy with the cute poet-trick-word-play at
the end of the fourth stanza and beginning of the fifth. The down-spread
watering cans are followed immediately by “up,” which is the direction of the
dog’s huffing. However, I love the brazenly lovable sweetness of the lab’s
“mouthy ball.” Anyone who doesn’t is simply wrong—and perhaps not entirely human. So maybe it’s okay to lead into it with that play on Down and Up, with
Up winning for now, though it huffs to do so.
Also, this curious juxtaposition of opposing directions is
abrupt and self-conscious. It’s arguable that the sounds and meanings,
especially across adjoining stanzas, further the quality of likability that informs the rest of the poem. Up and Down, we’re all in this
together as we bounce along, more or less merrily.
My final question:
what does it mean to have antique watering cans that are
“down-spread”? Are the spouts
tilted to the ground so that flowers reveal themselves in the holes at the
tops of the cans?
I’m taking time to puzzle over all this because I very much
like the poem as a whole. I like what it implies as well as its way of speaking. In spite of their age and creakiness, the characters and actions
convey the season of spring, full of life and hope. Amid images of fading, I
feel permitted to hope life will go on as long as the black dog keeps returning
with his “mouthy ball.” The mythology, energy, and illusions of springtime
promise that he’ll do it forever.
When Baker dares to declare, “These are the true lovers, /
this dog, this man,” he’s knocking on sentimentality’s door. However, the statement is so hyperbolic, so seemingly outrageous
that we can feel a touch of humor and irony in it, especially as they set the
stage, more gravely, for the old woman with her green oxygen tank. The adage about dogs as man's best friend earns new meanings, new life.
On the other hand, whether humorously or seriously, we might
worry about the man’s preferring the dog to the wife/mother. Isn’t man’s
connection to a wife and/or mother supposed to be the love story? But in this woman, there’s sickness and lurking mortality, while the dog
offers not only the requisite unconditional dog’s love, but also an enduring
image of vitality and action, even in old age. Maybe the man tosses the ball
“even farther” after the dog "pees" because urination is a biological function, and biological functions echo our mammalian mortality. The dog’s peeing is a necessary pause in the
thoughtless, epic ball-throwing marathon, which irritates and, perhaps unconsciously,
worries the man.
So throughout the poem there’s a tension, or dialectic,
between chaos, vulnerability and mortality on the one hand and, on the other hand, order, affection and life. The old man is “atilt,” the black lab “lops,”
the old woman “dodders” and “tips” down the path, and even the flowers “spill” from
upside-down watering cans. Yet the
old man is able to limber up and throw the ball still farther. The dog is
indefatigable, and even the weakened old woman’s “green tank” has a “sweet
vein,”—a reservoir of a bit more “breath” and a few more days or months.
The grass’s “rippling” strikes me as appealing and pretty, but it must
go in the same worrisome column as the “wild elsewhere in our world.” Still, the man’s
made a “path” for her there, and that path is “trim, soft underfoot.” The
untamed and the comfortable are in a constant back-and-forth. The flowers
spill, and the old man cannot name the third species of flora; so he
relegates it to that same “wild elsewhere,” which he will one day “tend.” (And what a
magnificent, provocative phrase we’re given in a “wild elsewhere.” Are all our elsewheres "wild" by definition?).
In Baker’s wonderful last line, that unnamed flower—wild and
therefore chaotic—will nevertheless come when he calls for it. It will be
tamed, like the dog or the “split rails” that are “docked” (like carefully arranged
boats in a marina) “along the
front walk.” In the yard “every
inch” is “pruned” into “fine blossom” and made “miniature.” The stones are
“set.” Nothing is left to chance.
I hear echoes of Yeats’ fondness for manicured nature, as in
“The Wild Swans at Coole,” rather than Wordsworth’s passion for mountains which
are themselves passionate, full of winds and storms that both menace and
instruct him. In Baker’s poem humans are engaged in a lovable effort to
manage
nature and wildness. That could easily be mocked as a sterile, mechanical, foolishly neoclassical,
micromanaged scene; but Baker sees the humanness of it all and smiles. Man,
“mother,” and dog will lose their struggle against chaos, wildness and death,
but for the moment the speaker embraces them. Even in the lab's repetition of returning with the ball, we see a desire for harmony, order, affection. Throughout Baker's homey dialectic, the speaker himself becomes one more “true
lover,” a benevolent sharer of a scene he’s
tended for us.
Old Man Throwing a Ball by David Baker : The Poetry Foundation
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