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Edward HirschA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Using sports themes, American poets examine popular culture and fame, youth and dynamism, tribal loyalties, or sometimes the pure form of the athlete as artist. Many sports poems depict the nobility and camaraderie commonly also seen in military odes and ballads honoring the strength, community, and devotion of soldiers on the field.
While “Fast Break” most immediately represents the random intervention of fallibility and death through the metaphor of a quick basketball game turnaround, the poem also harkens to the brotherhood of team sports (“together as brothers” in Line 20), the joy of moving as one with other people, and the glory of sacrificing oneself to a greater cause.
The basketball terms “shot” (Line 2), “defender” (Line 10), and “guard” (Lines 9 and 23) also resonate with martial meaning; when the offensive player commits, he “explodes / in a fury” (Line 25-26), like a weapon in battle. The military metaphor resonates most clearly in the most epitaph-like line of the poem, “for the game he loved like a country” (Line 32), imbuing the player’s dedication with increasing layers of meaning and scope.
Upward and downward movement constitutes a prominent theme in elegiac poetry, typically in the explicit motion of souls, metaphors of suns rising and setting, the rise and fall of tides, or the ascent and swoop of birds. This movement echoes the emotions of the bereaved as they fluctuate between joy and despair, the pain of loss and the hope for something eternal.
“Fast Break” uses as its central metaphor basketball, a game in which vertical movement plays a constant role through the ball’s motion and the score. The order and sense of the game functions in this poem the way the cycles of nature ground other elegies. Teams advance only with the upward and downward motion of the players and the ball itself, traveling up through the air to the basket. But the team can only score if the ball comes back down again in the right place.
While the game’s ups and downs stay in balance and proportion, the team with the most accuracy prevails mathematically, and the process affirms reason and sense. In “Fast Break,” the process breaks down when one player’s balance fails. While some memorials might have featured the deceased in a moment of triumph, this elegy enacts its own balance: depicting the moment when, despite the athletic perfection of the game, the player falls. In Line 22, the ball avoids “hitting the hardwood” since the players time their passes perfectly. But in Line 30, the player falls, “hitting the floor,” where he remains at the resolution of the poem, fallible, looking back at the descent of the ball through the net.
The poem centers on friendship, commemorating the poet’s connection to a specific friend and grieving the loss of that person. The poem’s narrative focuses on memory and love. The lost friend carries a great love for basketball, the “game he loved like a country” (line 32)—a claim that does not seem hyperbolic because the speaker depicts the player risking himself to play the game to its fullest. The speaker loves his lost friend, remembering him during a moment of splendor, though foreshadowing frailty. The speaker acts as witness to his friend’s highest and lowest moments: “the power forward explodes past them” (Line 25), and “inexplicably falling, hitting the floor” (Line 30). The word “inexplicably” shows the break in connection, the speaker unable to narrate his tragic loss explicitly. Possibly, the explanation for the suddenness of failure lies in the power-forward’s isolation: His loss of balance occurs once he runs ahead of his peers, “by himself now” and thus vulnerable in line 27, taking the risk on behalf of the team, making the shot at the cost of his physical safety.
Besides these personal types of love, the poem also addresses the love that exists in a community of shared purpose. This element adds both heartbreak and consolation to the elegy. The basketball community has lost a member, and as anyone who loves basketball knows, it’s much harder to play well down a man. But the poet crafting the elegy relies on art to help even readers who may know nothing about basketball: Everyone understands a shared passion. More power-forwards explode past defenders on courts every day. Strangers meeting on courts around the world become brothers after traveling together up and down the court, chasing a round object out of love. It may all pass by in a flash, a great “orange blur” (Line 33), but in the midst of motion, love grounds us, supports us, and knits us together.