Execution Poem Analysis

Cancer is something that can affect anyone’s friends and family, sometimes they are able to win the battle against the cancer. Cancer is a life-threatening disease that is difficult to combat, and many people lose their lives to the disease. In fact, cancer is one of the most common deaths in the United States. There are many tactics that can be implemented to fight against the cancer, but in the end these methods can often be proved to be useless, causing the battle to be lost. The author, Edward Hirsch, of the poem “Execution” writes in remembrance of his coach, a strong and stubborn man, who spent to much time wanting to win at the cost of his own life.
Imagery is used by the author, Hirsch, to express how devastating of a loss the coach …show more content…
The entirety of the poem could be an extended metaphor, were the football game is in reality the coach’s battle with cancer. The word “execution” has a double meaning one meaning to put into effect and the other meaning to carry out a death sentence. The coach’s “favorite word, execution,” (l. 9) is more than likely in the sense of to carry something out or to put into effect rather than to kill someone. He talks of a “perfect execution” or a play perfectly done leading them to victory, not killing the other team. Everything in the poem could reflect his battle with the illness instead of the author’s last game in his senior year. Rather than the word execution meaning to carry out it means to kill, something that cancer is doing to the coach. When discussing the “complete faith” he had in football, it could be suggesting that the coach had complete faith in the medical system only to be a failure in the end. In the lines that mention the football plays it correlates to the different types of treatment possible for cancer, but despite pulling every trick they had it was all for nothing. In “Execution” the line says, “When we met a downstate team … And power, with deadly, impersonal authority, /Machine-like fury, perfect execution.,” (l. 30-34). Unlike him, the cancer was able to pull off what he was not, a perfect execution. An illness shows no emotion and needs no teaching, it can act with a “machine-like fury” as cancer has no emotion. The very last game the coach ever played he lost, the game against cancer. This “game” was the singular most important one that he need to have won, yet he lost due his thirst to