The Pitcher by Robert Francis Poem Analysis

The Most Important Features in “The Pitcher” by Robert Francis The poem “The Pitcher” by Robert Francis tells the story of a pitcher’s purpose and frames it in terms of communication—as though in pitching the ball, the player is engaging in a form of communication with the batter that intends to be both accurate and misleading at once.

The pitcher is described as an individual who wants the batter to understand but “to understand too late”—i.e., to swing at a missed pitch or to watch a strike pass over the plate.

Francis uses the poem’s structure, diction, imagery, sounds, meter, symbols, irony and figures of speech to convey the subtle relationship between pitcher and batter in the game of baseball, and this paper will show how the poet accomplishes this in “The Pitcher.” The type of poem is a simple, unrhymed two-verse stanza type. Each line is structured metrically, consisting of 10-11 beats, or five feet per verse.

This gives the poem a measured pace that fits the subject, for whom everything is measured in order to deceive. Thus, “his art is eccentricity,” as the poet describes in the first line (Francis 1). The art is pitching and the term eccentricity refers to the fact that every pitch is designed to be off center so as to make it harder for the batter to hit (a pitch right down the middle of the plate is more likely to be one that the batter get wood on).

In this manner, the pitcher is imagined as an artist—like the poet—both trying to communicate an idea without being too obvious about it: “The others throw to be comprehended. He throws to be a moment misunderstood” (Francis 5-6). If the pitcher is too clear about the pitches he is going to throw, everyone will hit him.

Francis views the pitcher as one who must therefore strike a balance between being misleading and being true: for a pitcher must aim to be within the strike zone or near it, if he wants to get strikes and get batters out. The pitcher must do this again and again for another game—for very often a hundred pitches a game.

To reinforce the idea of the repetitious nature of the pitcher’s art, Francis makes each line like a variation on the same theme, repeating the same approach again and again for each stanza, altering it only slightly—like the pitcher’s pitches. Thus, the poem itself is like a symbol of the pitches that are being delivered.

Even the sounds are repetitious: one can hear the consonance of “v” sounds in the second stanza: “His passion how to avoid the obvious, His technique how to vary the avoidance” (Francis 3-4). Francis uses the figure of speech—the pitcher’s passion—in the third line—to indicate that this one, single act is all-consuming for the pitcher: it receives the entirety of his focus and attention; his whole being is wrapped up in this one act.

Ultimately, the poem is ironic because the pitcher’s position is ironic: he aims to be missed; he communicates in order to be misunderstood; he talks to the catcher through signs and symbols so that the batter might be confused; he tries to be off-center with his pitches—but not too “errant, arrant, wild” because then he will only end up walking batters and putting them on base (Francis 7).

The pitcher, like the poet, wants the batter (or reader) to chase, to swing at, to try to get. The irony is that the pitcher wants the batter to fail, but the poet wants the reader to succeed in terms of understanding the meaning. In.