18 pages • 36 minutes read
Edward HirschFast Break
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Rim
Opening the poem with the basketball suspended on the rim, not dropping into the basket or back down to the court, places the reader in a split second of time. We know the ball must fall, but the poem keeps us suspended along with it: in line 2 it “doesn’t drop.” The ball only moves at the exact right time in line 5 to be identified and captured by the center. The rim in the poem functions as a place of transition (literally and figuratively, since the scene depicts a transition during a basketball game). Just as other works of art use doorways and thresholds to herald a shift of some kind, the poem begins in a physically liminal space.
Time and Timing
Almost all elegies make note of time, especially the speed of its passing. The basketball metaphor in “Fast Break” serves Hirsch’s elegiac purpose exactly, as the entire narrative spills out briskly in one sentence like a sports announcer’s play-by-play. When all is well in the world of the game, time works with precision. For instance, in line 4, the starting center plays his role exactly and “times his jump / perfectly” (Lines 4-5). The same clockwork perfection occurs in lines 19 and 20, as players “in tandem, moving / together” go forward in step with one another. The title “Fast Break” emphasizes the poem’s focus on speed, both in the strength of the players and their effective use of youthful speed, and in the sudden turn when a player falls without warning. A fast break happens in basketball after a turnover. In the poem, the basketball fast break and its result, the fallen player, symbolize his early death—a more final interruption.
The Basketball
“Fast Break” moves vertically and horizontally, the players jumping to the basket, falling to the floor, and moving down the court. The round basketball is the focal point of these straight lines, though the poem often avoids describing its spherical nature. In the first line, the ball appears as “A hook shot,” resting on the rim. In the fifth line, the ball is “the orange leather,” retrieved by the center. Not until line 20 does the word “ball” appear—the speaker finally has enough collegiality with the reader, enough shared reference, to describe the basketball more directly. The ball manifests once more in line 26, when “taking the ball into the air,” the power-forward loses his balance. But immediately, the ball leaves the control of precise language: From the floor, he sees it as “an orange blur” (Line 33). The circle’s perfection shows clearest when it’s in the hands of the players, but even when it’s less controlled, it’s understood. The circle marks return, sense, repetition, and the eternal.
