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.
Background
Elegies: Historical and Modern
Though modern in its tone, form, and narrative, “Fast Break” maintains the traditional three-part elegy order of lament, praise, and consolation. The epigraph keeps the lament private but present, establishing the context and occasion for the poem before the narrative begins. Most of the poem focuses on praise, featuring a memory of the deceased in a successful moment only slightly marred by a misstep—a flaw that serves as a reminder of the speaker’s purpose in telling this story. The poem’s consolation aims directly at its hero, the fallen player, who turns to see his basket count. The reader’s consolation comes vicariously, as we celebrate his moment of glory, sharing the speaker’s posthumous admiration.
Hirsch’s poem intentionally evokes probably the most famous elegy written in friendship—Tennyson’s “In Memoriam, A.H.H.,” a poem so embedded in our consciousness that many people can quote its lines without ever having heard of its title: “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all” (“In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Canto 27, Lines 15-16). Tennyson employs similar themes of brotherhood (“Dear as the mother to the son / More than my brothers are to me,” “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Canto 9, Lines 15-16) and verticality (“Lo, as a dove when up she springs / To bear thro’ Heaven a tale of woe,” “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Canto 10, Lines 1-2) to commemorate his friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam, his close friend and literary advocate. Both poets portray their deceased friends falling suddenly in vigorous, athletic circumstances—Hirsch depicting a fall during a basketball game, while Tennyson alludes to drowning or falling form a horse—rather than depicting the illnesses that gradually took their friends’ lives. In Canto 55, Tennyson’s description of his own lack of faith in God and Nature after his friend’s death almost prefigures the action of Hirsch’s memorial: “I falter where I firmly trod / And falling with my weight of cares […] / I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope” (“In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Canto 55, Lines 13-17).
Memorial poems often vividly describe a memory of the deceased, preserving their vitality in a bid for immortality. In another 20th century elegy, “Elegy for Jane,” poet Theodore Roethke describes his deceased student in a moment when “startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her” (“Elegy for Jane,” Line 3), making even conversation vertical, dynamic, and visual. Roethke, like Hirsch, uses the image of an object teetering between two sides: Jane “balanced in the delight of her thought” (“Elegy for Jane, Line 4) like Hirsch’s basketball balances on the rim. Later, the speaker of Roethke’s poem acknowledges that time moves even after the subject’s death (“…you are not here, / waiting like a fern,” “Elegy for Jane,” Lines 14-15), as the ball eventually comes down in Hirsch’s poem as well. The third phase of elegy, consolation, can only be reached if the world moves on, even if this resumption of other lives seems cruel and unnatural. The final consolation for an elegy must be the idea that the deceased lives on in a changed world, as a memory, a force, and in the body of a poem.
Contemporary American Poetry
Placing an American poet in the context of Contemporary poetry sometimes raises more questions than definitive answers. American poetry in the 21st century draws on multiple traditions, many cultural contexts, and an enormous range of personal perspective. Some critics ascribe the many-faceted style of Contemporary American poetry to a splintered, isolated cultural mood without common experience or values. Others see a kaleidoscope of exciting, diverse voices able to realize Whitman’s claim “I contain multitudes” (“Song of Myself,” Section 51, Line 8) without irony or deceit. Spoken word poets, experimental poets, new formalists, regional poets: many subsections of Contemporary poetry exist.
Unlike the Contemporary voices with ties to the 20th century Confessional movement, Edward Hirsch’s work portrays intimate emotion without being especially personal. For his subject matter, he draws from history and culture without being expressly political. His ekphrastic, or rhetorical, poetry avoids becoming academic and exclusionary. In his book On Love, for instance, a reader does not have to know who Collette might have been in order to understand her perspective on romance in the Hirsch poem written in her voice. A reader might never have seen Edward Hopper’s painting “House by the Railroad” to understand the loneliness Hirsch imagines in both the subject and the painter.
In “Fast Break,” Hirsch tells a personal story, but we only know this is the case from the epigraph, where he names his friend to whom the poem is dedicated. The speaker conveys the poet’s emotion through suspense, excitement, and finally wonder—the same emotional arc the reader experiences. Grief is primarily in the background or subtext, as the poem’s text instead celebrates with action, wordplay, acoustic features, and structure that acknowledges but does not quite constitute formal verse. Hirsch’s acceptance in both academic and popular contexts places him in a small group among Contemporary poets. “Fast Break” exemplifies his ability to employ and modify traditional poetic techniques, accessing the imagery and sound features of lyric poetry along with the cinematic drive of narrative poetry. In “Fast Break,” academics can find allusions, devices, and formal considerations, while a reader can find universal emotions unfolding in a place that could be anywhere. Hirsch’s poetry addresses the soul first, and the intellect follows.
