Athlete Dying Young Poem

“To an Athlete Dying Young” & “Ex-Basketball Player”
In Both, “To an Athlete dying Young” and “Ex basketball player”, We experience several poetic devices that compare and contrast eachother in these fairly similar poems. In the poem written by John Updike, “Ex-Basketball Player”, Flick a fictional character is stuck in a loop and his daunting past wrecks his current future. In this poem flicks past shows a young basketball player is praised for setting several records and being a country legend, but when his renown fame dissipates he is left with nothing to do, due to his lack of focus in high school and determination to be the best player. Hence his distractions in the past we observe him being a tall guy next to five idiot pumps this is taken as imagery and we can interpret this as him working at a gas station. …show more content…
The difference in this poem is that unlike getting stuck in the town the outstanding basketball player passed away and instead of his moment of fame fading away he is renown within the town for his heroic characteristics. A line that really stood out to me from this poem was “Runners who renown outran And the name died before the man”. This sentence shows personification alike to the “Idiot Pumps in the “Ex-Basketball Player” but explains to the reader that fame outruns most people similar to Flick and his short but sweet moment of fame, but in this case the athlete “escapes” this and none of his fame dissipates due to his early death. If we compare both of these poems even further and research these poetic devices we can observe that “To an Athlete Dying Young”, consists of seven quatrains compared to only five stanzas in the “Ex-Basketball Player”;this poem also does not contain a rhyme scheme while “An Athlete Dying Young” contains an aabb rhyme scheme. Although these poems are both on Basketball players who obtained fame we can compare and contrast them as so and analyze them to