I know we have discussed Dickenson previously...what I'm hoping for here are posts about some favorite poems or writings of this talemted gentleman.
His book, "A Round of Golf Courses" is in my collection. If I am not mistaken, he wrote other books, but perhaps none except this one about golf.
Here is how he described The Old Course:
But never was a course so like the motions of the sea:
the slow, steady start of the first four holes,
the sudden stride of the long ‘Hole o’ Cross’,
this is just like the movement of the ebb —
running quickly now through ‘Heathery’ to its farthest out,
the 7th, the ‘High Hole’.
Now comes slack water in truth,
for here is the loop and 8, 9 and 10 at flat,
slack-water holes, to be exploited with all possible power.
It is as if here at low water the old wreck shows its ribs,
and one has just time to dig for the treasure in its hold
before the tide turns again . . .
and now as, just before it turns,
the tide seems suddenly to recede a little farther
and then begins to ripple inwards,
now comes the short 11th.
Its green pairs with the 7th but is a little farther out
on the very edge of the links,
so that a shot over the green seems as if it will drop
splash! into the estuary of the Eden . . .
From the twelfth tee to the eighteenth green,
in floods the tide,
and perhaps you are being lucky enough
and playing well enough to come in with it
until you reach the ‘Road Hole’,
where the last sandcastle of your golfing pride and hope
must stand against the waves until you are safely
on the eighteenth tee.
— Patric Dickinson, A Round of Golf Courses