Summary Of The Poem Execution By Edward Hirsh

So many different plays are called during a football game in order to increase the team’s chances of winning the competition. In Edward Hirsh’s poem “Execution,” a much more difficult battle is being waged against the coach. The narrator’s use of structure, tone, and symbolic meaning helps the reader to essentially level with them and understand the gravity of the situation that the coach and everyone else is in now. Some of the most basic fundamental tasks can lead you to victory on a football field. Throughout the poem, the narrator uses a free verse structure that is one of the essential elements of poetry. In the lines, “Like pencil marks from the sun, like intricate / Drawings on the chalkboard, small x’s and o’s / That he copied …show more content…
The coach has recently been diagnosed with cancer and really doesn’t have a specific “play” that he can call or fundamental he can rely on to upstage this condition as he has become accustomed to during a typical football game. The control factor is taken out of his situation which is not something that he is typically lacking at any given time. A typical high school football coach is noticed as a leader of men in most cases and most of the time is in the “lime light” of a community. The narrator paints a picture of what it is like when a coach who is admired and respected begins to have that “human factor”. He begins to deteriorate right before everyone’s eyes. This goes to show that even the larger than life character cannot escape certain cruelties on this earth. As effortlessly as it might seem to defeat a football team, cancer can take over someone’s body just as naturally. Certain traits of a high school football coach are explained through the eyes of a former player in the poem “Execution,” by Edward Hirsch. Tone, structure, and symbolic meaning of the poem paint a clear picture of a coach who is no longer competing in football, but trying to conquer father time. As much planning and such that goes into football, nothing can prepare the coach with what he is going to have to deal with in the coming