Poetry: Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle

The theme for this month’s National Poetry Day is “games”, and the Scottish Poetry Library has chosen a whole variety for its annual set of postcards: football, skipping, hockey, battleships, bingo; games of the imagination …

And golf, of course, in the swinging lines of Arthur Conan Doyle, reprinted in part here from his collection Songs of Action (1898). His view is democratic – although he doesn’t specifically mention ladies playing the game (the Ladies’ Golf Union was established in 1893) – and just saying the poem out loud is a tonic.

It’s up and away from our work to-day,

For the breeze sweeps over the down;

And it’s hey for a game where the gorse blossoms flame,

And the bracken is bronzing to brown.

With the turf ’neath our tread and the blue overhead,

And the song of the lark in the whin;

There’s the flag and the green, with the bunkers between –

Now will you be over or in? […]

Come youth and come age, from the study or stage,

From Bar or from Bench – high and low!

A green you must use as a cure for the blues –

You drive them away as you go.

We’re bound on a long, long round,

And it’s time to be up and away:

If worry and sorrow come back with the morrow,

At least we’ll be happy today.

You can collect National Poetry Day postcards from your local library and other arts venues, or for a full set of 8, send a SAE marked ‘NPD 2011’ to the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Canongate, Edinburgh EH8 8DT. See www.spl.org.uk for downloadable posters, or contact the SPL at [email protected], tel: [phone].