Poem Analysis: Foul Shot

1. The first and second line in the poem Foul Shot effectively portrays the situation because it sets the scene by telling the reader it is a tie game with very little time left and anyone who has witnessed this happen can recognize that it is very suspenseful, “With two 60’s stuck on the scoreboard and two seconds hanging on the clock.” Another line that is very effective at portraying the situation is line 14, “Waits,” because it is the last of three single worded lines which contain only actions, and when these actions occur they take very little time, but when read they take more time due to the pauses between lines. Since these lines are read so slowly, the actions seem as if they are in slow motion which makes them very suspenseful. The last line that I think effectively portrays the situation is “Squeezed by silence,” because it explains the pressure …show more content…
Hoey wrote this poem as two long sentences and uses commas to separate each line because the first and the seconds sentence describes two different things. The first sentence describes what the player making the shot is doing and feeling; I know this because of lines such as, “squeezed by silence,” and “raises the ball on his right hand.” The second sentence on the other hand describes what the ball is doing and what everyone else is doing as a result; I know this because of the lines, “The ball slides up and out,” and “dives down and through.”

3. Hoey uses similar sounds in lines 19 – 22, “lands, leans, wobbles, wavers, hesitates, exasperates.” In these lines there are two examples of alliterations and one example of assonance. The examples of alliterations are “lands, leans,” which both begin with an ‘l’ and “wobbles, wavers,” which both begin with a ‘w’. The example of assonance in the lines are “hesitates, exasperate,” because both words end in ‘ates’. Hoey uses contrasting sounds in line 15, “and then through a stretching of stillness,” where the words “stretching” and “stillness” both begin with