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From Dairy Daddies to Trash Pandas: How branding creates fans for lower-league baseball teams

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From Dairy Daddies to Trash Pandas: How branding creates fans for lower-league baseball teams

Maybe you’ve seen him.

Perhaps his sideways glance and piercing blue eyes have crossed your timeline. His smirk might be all over your TikTok. If you follow baseball or if your algorithm has decided you like livestock, you may have encountered McCreamy, the muscular mascot of the Danville Dairy Daddies.

The brawny bull with a bright pink nose dons blue jeans and a “DD” belt buckle but no shirt, propping one hoof on his hip while the other rests against a bat standing by his feet. His unveiling went viral, providing a level of exposure not usually seen for a collegiate summer baseball team from an unincorporated Virginia city of 42,000 people in the regional Old North State League.

But this was no accident. The Danville Dairy Daddies knew exactly what they were doing.

There’s a story behind their name, a thought process behind their color palette and an award-winning designer behind their logo. Such is the case for many of the eccentric team names filling the minor leagues and collegiate summer leagues in recent years. The magic lies in the quirks that tie the clubs to their communities. The fun comes from the winks, nods and Easter eggs that teams incorporate in their branding to tell locals, “Hey, we know what makes this town special, and we’re leaning into it.”

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That’s partially how a topless bull came to represent a team in Pittsylvania County, which boasts three of the five largest dairy farms in Virginia. The Dairy Daddies moniker was initially suggested to general manager Austin Scher as a potential name for Danville’s first collegiate summer team, the Otterbots, in 2021. Over the next three years, the alliteration stuck in Scher’s brain, and when he learned of the local connection, there was no denying the divining of the Dairy Daddies and their main man McCreamy.

“While it is quirky and silly and somewhat tongue in cheek, there is a very real community connection,” Scher said. “The blue and pink are designed to elicit feelings of newness, of birth, of rebirth. You see those two colors together and you might think of a gender reveal party or a nursery. Then you look at this muscle-bound cow, and you’re thinking, ‘Well, that’s not a baby. That’s very much full-grown.’ Danville and all of southern Virginia are in the middle of this massive resurgence.”

Each component of McCreamy conveys a characteristic of his community. Paul Caputo, host of the “Baseball by Design” podcast, which explores the origin stories for minor-league nicknames, sees that same quality in team names across the country.

“You can tell the story of America by understanding why minor-league baseball teams have the names that they have,” he said.

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The Dairy Daddies are just the latest in a long line of lower-league baseball teams that shirk traditional names in favor of more eye-catching identities. Pinpointing the origins of the trend is difficult — you could trace it all the way back to the late 1800s, when a team called the Dudes existed in Pensacola, Fla. — but the recent surge of silliness stems in part from Major League Baseball’s downsizing of the affiliated minor leagues from 163 teams to 120. Forty-three franchises lost their affiliation in 2020. Many of those teams played under the same names as their former MLB parent clubs and had to rebrand. Former rookie-league teams like the Burlington (N.C.) Royals and Pulaski  (Va.) Yankees re-emerged as the Sock Puppets and River Turtles to play collegiate summer ball in the Appalachian League.

Teams that maintained their MLB affiliations have also jumped on the funky name train with hopes of invigorating their brands. Pick nearly any league, at any level, and there’s a nickname or logo that will make you stop and gawk. The Carolina Disco Turkeys. The Montgomery (Ala.) Biscuits (formerly the Orlando Rays). The Minot (N.D.) Hot Tots. The Rocket City (Ala.) Trash Pandas (formerly the Mobile BayBears). The Wichita Chili Buns (an alternate identity of the Wichita Wind Surge).

Without the constant media coverage and cash flow MLB organizations enjoy, lower-league teams have to get creative to stir up engagement, increase exposure and keep their franchises afloat.

“I see pictures of people visiting the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal and they’re wearing Trash Pandas shirts when they do it,” Rocket City’s director of marketing Ricky Fernandez said. “It blows my mind that someone’s like, ‘We’re going to the Eiffel Tower today! I better get my finest raccoon astronaut T-shirt on so I can snap a selfie!’”

Even with a local connection, an unusual name can take time to accept. Take the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp. The Miami Marlins’ Triple-A affiliate played as the Suns from 1990 to 2016, when new ownership took over. Though the new team name has a tie-in to the local shrimping industry, the public wasn’t immediately sold. Noel Blaha, Jacksonville’s vice president of marketing and media, said the antipathy was expected and they planned the reveal accordingly.

“We very purposefully had some elementary school kids in the front row of the press conference because if things turned sideways and people were throwing tomatoes, they weren’t gonna go after the kids,” he said.

Still, someone started an online petition to change the name back to the Suns. Five thousand people signed within two hours.

“We got angry Facebook posts. We got some very offensive emails,” Blaha said. “People were pissed, point blank.”

But slowly, the tide turned.

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“What it resulted in was incredible merchandise sales in the months leading up to the start of the season, and then the season started and we set an attendance record that weekend,” he said.

The DubSea (Wash.) Fish Sticks (previously the Highline Bears) experienced the same rejection-turned-resurgence after their new identity won an online poll pitting Fish Sticks against Seal Slingers as the two options for the team name.

“I had zero people get angry about the name the Highline Bears. I also had zero people get excited about it,” team president Justin Moser said. “Before we rebranded, I don’t think we ever sold anything online. Maybe one or two t-shirts as the Highline Bears.”

Despite social media comments calling the new name stupid and “a disgrace to the area,” the Fish Sticks have since shipped orders to all 50 states and nine countries. They recorded five sellouts last summer and announced that their June 1 season opener sold out on April 23.


Fin Crispy Jr. is the mascot for the DubSea Fish Sticks, a summer collegiate baseball team in Washington. (Photo: Blake Dahlin / courtesy of the DubSea Fish Sticks)

These days, teams that aren’t getting creative with branding can seem a bit stale, said Caputo.

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“Being named for a local animal just feels very 1990s,” he added. “It feels old.”

That’s where sports branding companies come in. In the minor-league baseball space, there are two heavy hitters responsible for most of the new, splashy nicknames: Brandiose and Studio Simon. Team staffers work with designers to brainstorm an identity linked to the local history, industries, cuisine, natural landmarks or traditions.

“Every community has a story waiting to be told, and the goal is that when you visit a sports experience, particularly in minor-league baseball, we want you to step into a whole other world,” Brandiose co-founder Jason Klein said. “We want you to step into a story, a nine-inning vacation as we call it. But that story is the story of your hometown.”

Anchoring each team’s story is its logo, the main character of the narrative. Amarillo Sod Poodles GM Tony Ensor knew that nailing his Texas League team’s logo would be key to winning over naysayers, so he went to Brandiose with detailed instructions.

“I want the mouth to be John Wayne,” he said of the animated black-tailed prairie dog, “and the eyes to be Clint Eastwood.”

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The Amarillo Sod Poodles are the Double-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks. (Photo: John E. Moore III / Getty Images)

Scher, the Dairy Daddies GM, had similarly specific requests for Studio Simon creative director Dan Simon when molding McCreamy. Simon envisioned the bull as having a dad bod. The response was a swift “no.”

“They wanted him built but not Arnold Schwarzenegger-built. He’s fine-tuned,” Simon said. “This cow was going to be kind of a ladies’ man. Or, in this case, a male cow is a bull. So he’s a cow’s man.”

Partially inspired by McDreamy, the surgeon Patrick Dempsey portrays in “Grey’s Anatomy,” McCreamy also embodies the spirit of another beloved TV character. Simon sees the bull as boasting the charisma of Joey Tribbiani from “Friends” with a facial expression that seems to ask, “How you doin’?”

These flirty, wacky, happy characters do get some blowback for deviating from traditional logos, or for being kitschy tactics intended to sell T-shirts. But Simon, Klein and the teams that proudly play as Sock Puppets, Trash Pandas and Sod Poodles shrug off that notion.

“The sports fans are going to go to the games anyway,” Simon said. “These identities are drawing people who wouldn’t otherwise come, and hopefully when they do come, they go, ‘Hey, this was fun! I’m going to come again!’ It’s not like you drew them in under false pretenses. It’s not that at all. Minor-league and collegiate summer league baseball, it’s fun! It’s fun to go to those games, so you bring in new fans and you’ve made new fans who hopefully come back.”

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The players, whether they’re college athletes trying to get on scouts’ radars or minor leaguers assigned to the clubs by their MLB organizations, also benefit from the increased exposure and engaged crowds.

“I’ve heard from several players that it’s like a little taste of the majors before you actually make it to the show,” Fernandez of the Trash Pandas said. “The old team we had before they moved, we were getting like 200, 300 people a game. It was kinda sad to be at a game because there’d be so many empty seats. Here we’ve led the league in attendance every single season. We average 5,000 people a night.”

Los Angeles Angels starting shortstop Zach Neto, who played 37 games for Rocket City (based in Madison, Ala.) on his path to the majors, had a pair of custom Trash Panda cleats made and said he still rocks the team’s merch.

“We got to play there in an awesome atmosphere every night,” he said. “Even to this day, I still see myself as a Trash Panda.”

The college kids feel it, too. East Carolina catcher Ryan McCrystal, who spent the last two summers as a Burlington Sock Puppet, said the North Carolina community embraced all the players but admitted it can take a bit of effort to convince friends and family you’re playing for a real team.

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“They think it’s a joke, but I think it’s really cool because it’s easier to rally around a team with that kind of name. It’s easier to build up a community around a team name that is something that brings people together,” he said.

“It’s the only sport that you can really do it where it makes sense. It’s something small but beautiful about the game.”

(Illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic; top photos courtesy of Rocket City Trash Pandas, Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp) 

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Poetry Challenge Day 3: W.H. Auden, The Poet and His Technique

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Poetry Challenge Day 3: W.H. Auden, The Poet and His Technique

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Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)

For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”

Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).

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In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”

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In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.

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“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:

Admirer as I think I am 

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Of stars that do not give a damn, 

I cannot, now I see them, say 

I missed one terribly all day. 

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Ken Burns, filmmaker

The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.

Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.

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He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.

His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.

In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.

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W.H. Auden (left) and Chester Kallman in Venice, in 1949. Stephen Spender, via Bridgeman Images

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It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:

If equal affection cannot be, 

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Let the more loving one be me. 

Yiyun Li, writer

In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.

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Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.

Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.

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Scansion marks from one of Auden’s notebooks, dated 1955-65. Copyright by The Estate of W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. W.H. Auden papers, Berg Collection, The New York Public Library. Photograph by Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times.

He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.

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Lists of rhyming words from another of Auden’s notebooks, dated 1957-59. Copyright by The Estate of W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. W.H. Auden papers, Berg Collection, The New York Public Library. Photograph by Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times.

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The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.

Admirer as I think I am 

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Of stars that do not give a damn, 

I cannot, now I see them, say 

I missed one terribly all day. 

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W.H. Auden, poet

The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.

This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!

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But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.

Your first task: Learn the first two lines!

Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.

Question 1/6

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Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.

Admirer as I think I am 

Of stars that do not give a damn, 

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Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.

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Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.

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Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.

Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.

Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.

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Book Review: ‘Permanence,’ by Sophie Mackintosh

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Book Review: ‘Permanence,’ by Sophie Mackintosh

PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh


Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”

Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”

When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.

Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.

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“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.

The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”

Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.

Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”

Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”

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“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.

“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”

In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.

It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.

What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.

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That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.


PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28

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Poetry Challenge Day 2: Love, How It Works and What It Means

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Poetry Challenge Day 2: Love, How It Works and What It Means

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Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).

This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.

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Looking up at the stars, I know quite well 

That, for all they care, I can go to hell, 

But on earth indifference is the least 

We have to dread from man or beast. 

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Ada Limón, poet

Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.

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How should we like it were stars to burn 

With a passion for us we could not return? 

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David Sedaris, writer

The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.

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If equal affection cannot be, 

Let the more loving one be me. 

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Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet

Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:

Come live with me and be my love,

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And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

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Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:

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How should we like it were stars to burn 

With a passion for us we could not return? 

Josh Radnor, actor

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And it features strong end rhymes:

If equal affection cannot be, 

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Let the more loving one be me. 

Samantha Harvey, writer

These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:

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I do not like thee, Doctor Fell

The reason why I cannot tell.

But this I know and know full well

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I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.

This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.

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W.H. Auden as a young man. Tom Graves, via Bridgeman Images

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But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.

What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.

This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:

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As lines, so loves oblique may well

Themselves in every angle greet;

But ours so truly parallel,

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Though infinite, can never meet.

Andrew Marvell, “The Definition of Love

The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”

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The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:

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How should we like it were stars to burn 

With a passion for us we could not return? 

Mary Roach, writer

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The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:

If equal affection cannot be, 

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Let the more loving one be me. 

Tim Egan, writer

Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.

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Your task today: Learn the second stanza!

Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.

Question 1/6

Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.

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How should we like it were stars to burn 

With a passion for us we could not return? 

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Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.

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Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.

Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.

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Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.

Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.

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