Lllama - Other Poems

Other Poems

Nash was a baseball fan, and he wrote a poem titled "Line-Up for Yesterday", an alphabetical poem listing baseball immortals. Published in Sport magazine in January 1949, the poem pays tribute to the baseball greats and to his own fanaticism, in alphabetical order. Here is a sampling from his A to Z list:

C is for Cobb, Who grew spikes and not corn, And made all the basemen Wish they weren't born.

D is for Dean, The grammatical Diz, When they asked, Who's the tops? Said correctly, I is.

E is for Evers, His jaw in advance; Never afraid To Tinker with Chance.

F is for Fordham And Frankie and Frisch; I wish he were back With the Giants, I wish.

He also wrote a poem called "all about people" which criticises employers who ill treat others.

Nash particularly loved Baltimore sports teams.

Nash wrote humorous poems for each movement of the Camille Saint-Saëns orchestral suite The Carnival of the Animals, which are sometimes recited when the work is performed. The original recording of this version was made by Columbia Records in the 1940s, with Noël Coward reciting the poems and Andre Kostelanetz conducting the orchestra.

Many of his poems, reflecting the times in which they were written, presented stereotypes of different nationalities. For example in Genealogical Reflections he writes:

No McTavish Was ever Lavish

And in The Japanese published in 1938 one finds:

How courteous is the Japanese

He always says, Excuse it, please

He climbs into his neighbor’s garden

And smiles, and says, I beg your pardon

He bows and grins a friendly grin

And calls his hungry family in

He grins, and bows a friendly bow

So sorry, this my garden now