George Herman “Babe” Ruth died on August 16, 1948, and the next day, Grantland Rice (1880–1954) published a small elegy in The New York Sun with the title “Game Called.” Sometime in the 1950s, Grant would change the poem for the “Fireside Book of Baseball,” making it more formal and more sententious, more deliberately uplifting. Which is a shame, for the Sun original had an unstudied sorrow about it — a real sense that something strong and vibrant had been wrenched from the American scene.

Grandiloquence always tempted Rice. He wrote well, as well he ought, a 1901 graduate of Vanderbilt with a degree in Classics. But in his rise from local sports reporting to a nationally syndicated column, building his reputation as the dean of American sportswriters, he always showed his love for big figures — the winners of sports as the battle of life: Bill Tilden in tennis, Jack Dempsey in boxing, Bobby Jones in golf, Knute Rockne in football. He set out in his grandiloquent prose to make these men seem ancient Greek and Roman demigods, fighting epic battles upon the plains of American sports. He wanted his readers to see an ancient mythology replayed in the new American athletic competitions.

Rice actually published a minor book of poetry, “Songs of the Stalwart,” in 1917. But the thing to remember is that formal verse was simply an idiom that writers were expected to know. Like his fellow newspapermen from whom we’ve featured Poems of the Day — Franklin P. Adams (1881–1960) and Don Marquis (1878–1937) — Rice was part of what may have been the last generation of writers to assume both that rhymed poetry was the peak of word use and that poetry was called on for casual occasions of comedy and formal occasions of sorrow.

His poem for Ruth, written and published in a day, is a kind of extended sonnet, with four quatrains of pentameter followed by a closing couplet. That couplet is not much good (and he would drop it in the 1950s version), but Rice was writing at speed, and he wanted to make us understand that the loss of Babe Ruth actually was a loss, something bright and grand and mythological taken away from us. “Game Called — what more is there for us to say? / How dull and drab the field looks to the eye.”

Game Called
by Grantland Rice

Game Called by darkness — let the curtain fall.
No more remembered thunder sweeps the field.
No more the ancient echoes hear the call
To one who wore so well both sword and shield:

The Big Guy’s left us with the night to face
And there is no one who can take his place.
Game Called — and silence settles on the plain.
Where is the crash of ash against the sphere?

Where is the mighty music, the refrain
That once brought joy to every waiting ear?
The Big Guy’s left us lonely in the dark
Forever waiting for the flaming spark.

Game Called — what more is there for us to say?
How dull and drab the field looks to the eye
For one who ruled it in a golden day
Has waved his cap to bid us all good-bye.

The Big Guy’s gone — by land or sea or foam
May the Great Umpire call him “safe at home.”
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.