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.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
Basketball and elegies both inhabit formal structures while taking risks within them. While “Fast Break” does not follow a traditional form, its two-line stanzas provide a regular shape and a connection to theme. The pairs of lines and their interwoven assonance and alliteration mirror the duality of the game—pairs of players anticipating each other’s moves and functioning as one. A regular repetition of four stressed beats per line reads like tetrameter. Though using a loose metrical and stanzaic form to cement his poem as contemporary and conversational, the poet creates resolution and closure in the final lines—a traditional elegiac trait. Punctuating the poem as one long sentence keeps it moving faster than a traditional, meditative elegy. This choice also connects to the subject: the suddenness with which death can arrive, even in a life of perfection and vitality.
Alliteration and Assonance
In the poem’s loose formal structure, alliteration and assonance knit together images and provide a percussive rhythm. Each two-line stanza features alliteration or assonance—often both. The structure replicates the call and response effect of interlinear patterns in Anglo-Saxon verse forms, epic poems composed of longer lines with an intervening caesura, or break. Here, the effect spreads across two lines and thus makes a softer echo, though still unifying each stanza acoustically. In lines 1 and 2, the h of “hook” repeats in “hangs” and “helplessly.” Some stanzas feature dense alliteration, like lines 7 and 8, where s sounds unify sudden movements: “spinning,” “strike,” “shoveling.” In the same lines, “around” and “outlet” connect with assonance—the diphthong ou. Lines 21 and 22—the stanza depicting the players communicating effortlessly and wordlessly, passing the ball in perfect rhythm with each other—weave b, h, and ou sounds: “between,” “without,” dribble,” “without,” “bounce,” “hitting,” “hardwood.” In those same lines, “dribble” and “single” also create an embedded feminine rhyme. Using alliterative techniques allows the poet to satisfy auditory expectations like a melody in music, without becoming predictable or maudlin.
Metaphor and Simile
“Fast Break” consists of an extended metaphor: In basketball and in life, circumstances can turn quickly toward celebration or tragedy. The poem portrays multiple instances when luck or fate decides the players’ actions. A shot “hangs there, helplessly,” in line 2, neither in or out of the basket. A man stands “letting the play develop in front of him” (Line 14), unable to intervene. With neutral information, a player “commits to the wrong man” (Line 24), making an unlucky choice. The power-forward, the player memorialized in the poem, falls as “inexplicably” on the court (Line 30) as he will later fall in death.
The shot he makes before falling, the one that floats “perfectly” through the net (Line 34), resolves the poem and the metaphor, keeping the poem’s terrain in the realm of an idyllic moment of triumph. But the player’s fall reminds readers that even in moments of the greatest happiness and success, the fall remains, and mortality comes for everyone.
The only past tense moment of the poem happens after the player falls to the floor in line 30 “for the game he loved like a country” (Line 32). The simile “like a country” may seem sudden among the basketball images, but considering the strength of team sport allegiance, the comparison serves only to amplify the established sense of brotherhood and unity exhibited in the game play’s depiction.
