The Team Named After a Poem

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Friday

Poetry lovers have an obvious National Football League team to root for this weekend as Baltimore battles Kansas City for the conference championship. As far as I know, the Baltimore Ravens are the only sports team in the world named after a poem. (Please contact me if you know any others. Allusions to Homer’s Trojans do not count.)

But what a strange work to be named after!  The poem that made Edgar Allan Poe famous is about a man depressed over his lost love Lenore, with the visitor who refuses to leave a symbol for his gloom. It’s not exactly a football drama.

I imagine Baltimore issuing dire threats to other teams: mess with us and you’ll sink into permanent melancholy. We’ll make you extremely depressed—albeit in a very poetic way.

Although Poe is associated with several cities, Baltimore was particularly important to him. As the website Poe Baltimore notes,

It was in Baltimore that Poe sought refuge when he had feuded with his foster father, John Allan, and was compelled to leave the house. It was in Baltimore that Poe found his future wife, Virginia Eliza Clemm, and in Baltimore that he placed his feet on the first steps of what would be his career for the next 17 years. Perhaps most revealing, when asked for the place of his birth, Poe turned his back on Boston and claimed Baltimore instead.

Baltimore was also where Poe transitioned from poetry to the macabre short stories for which (along with “The Raven”) he is most remembered.

Given this history, it made sense to honor Poe when owner Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, necessitating a new name. Ravens, furthermore, are ominous birds, often associated with death. If one wants to strike fear into opposing teams, it’s not a bad mascot to have.

Indeed, the Ravens have been scaring teams for some time now. The team that won the Super Bowl in 2000 featured one of the greatest defensive units ever, and the team that won it again in 2013 had the indominatable Terrell Suggs as a linebacker. The current team is similarly scary on defense. According to Jamison Hensley’s ESPN article, this past season the Ravens

became the first team in NFL history to lead the league in fewest points allowed (16.5), most sacks (60) and most takeaways (31) in a single season. Baltimore shut down this year’s best offenses, including dominating the top three – the Miami Dolphins, San Francisco 49ers and Detroit Lions — and quarterbacks were hit so hard five had to leave games this season. In the 34-10 divisional playoff win over the Houston Texans on Saturday, the Ravens held Houston without an offensive touchdown and didn’t let standout rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud run a play inside Baltimore’s 25-yard line.

Hensley explains that a key reason for their effectiveness is defensive coordinator Mike MacDonald, who has

devised a scheme of versatility and unpredictability where 355-pound nose tackle Michael Pierce drops into coverage, defensive tackle Justin Madubuike sometimes crashes the edge and strong safety Kyle Hamilton lines up everywhere.

In other words, when teams have threatened to score on this team, the Ravens have responded, “Nevermore.”

To be sure, the poem describes a cerebral assault rather than a full body one, but this fits the storyline as well. As the defense this Sunday goes up against the man whom some are predicting will garner even more Super Bowl rings than Tom Brady, commentators talk about the contest as a chess match. Of course, chess doesn’t involve 250-pound guys trying to pulverize you.

But it’s certainly true that the Ravens have ways of getting inside their opponents’ heads, which is what the raven does to the poor writer in Poe’s poem. This applies not only to the defense but also to its electric quarterback Lamar Jackson, who runs when you think he’s going to throw and throws when you think he’s going to run. In the poem, the “ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore” flies in and sits on a bust of Pallas Athena, informing the speaker that it will never leave. (The Raven is associated with the goddess of wisdom because Poe sees depression as an intellectual condition.) Over the years, the Ravens have set up permanent residence in the minds of many opponents.

If the Pittsburgh Steelers years ago were famed for their “Steel Curtain,” the Ravens could be called the “Purple Curtain,” filling other teams with “fantastic terrors”:

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors . . .

Admittedly, the Ravens are hardly silken, sad, or uncertain. Nor do they go “gently rapping” on your door.

But “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird[s] of yore”? Sounds right. “Bird or fiend”? Yes to both. “Thing of evil” from Night’s Plutonian shore that has been tossed by some tempest upon us? That’s been the experience of various opponents.

The weather bureau informs us that on Sunday we can expect (to apply a couple of Poe adjectives) bleak and dreary weather. Baltimore fans hope that, by the end of the game, Chief players will be begging, “Take thy beak from out my heart.”

Other Possibilities for Poetic Team Names

Here are a few inspired by other American poems that I came up with off the top of my head. Can you identify the poems. And send me other suggestions:

–The Embattled Farmers (their shots downfield are heard round the world)
–The Barbaric Yawps  (the team plays with energy and passion but individual players sing too many self praises)
–The Ragged Claws (they have the opposite problem, good team players that are plagued by indecisive leaders who find it impossible to say just what they mean)
–The Eagles of the Sea, a.k.a. Old Ironsides (they have fierce battles with their archrivals, the Harpies of the Shore)
–The Howl (the team has trouble passing drug tests)
–The Excitable Tulips (an effeminate name but the team boasts a suffocating defense)

Answer key

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
–T.S. Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood
   Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
   And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
   Or know the conquered knee;—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
   The eagle of the sea!
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Old Ironsides”

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…
—Allen Ginsberg, Howl

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.   
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.   
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.   
–Sylvia Plath, “Tulips”