The poetry of sport

Commenting on Lance Franklin’s two-week suspension, ABC Radio National sports reporter Warwick Hadfield said this morning:

“…it appears more likely the Hawks will join the long list of people lobbying against the new law that effectively ends ‘the bump’ as part of the game of Australian football. That’s a noble cause perhaps, but as that little back pocket Percy Bysshe Shelley once said, “Nought may endure but Mutablilty.” Times have changed and football looks like it’s going to have to change with it.”

We all know what Shelley meant: in modern English, we tend to say that change happens constantly.

Here’s the full text of Shelley’s poem, “Mutability”:

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! -yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. -A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. -One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! -For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutablilty.

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