THE BALL POEM

ABOUT THE POET: A scholar and professor as well as a poet, John Berryman is best-known for The Dream Songs (1969), an intensely personal sequence of 385 poems which brought him the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. In these he invented a style and form able to accommodate a vast range of material while expressing his turbulent emotions.

 

MESSAGE OF THE POEM: He gave a lesson that is full of wisdom through the loss of everyone, must learn to bear the pain associated with loss. The losses may be the loss of personal possession or the death of some near and dear one or due to the separation from the beloved one. As long as there is life, everyone has to bear many types of losses. Therefore we need to learn the way for bearing those losses.

 

SUMMARY:

The poet is talking about a little boy who has lost his ball. He was playing with his ball. The ball skipped from his hand and went into the nearby water body. The poet says that this sight of the boy losing his favourite ball made him think about the boy and his reaction to this situation. He further says that the boy was helplessly looking into the water where his ball had gone. He was sad and was trembling with fear. He got so immersed in his sorrow that he kept standing near the harbour for a very long time and kept on looking for his ball. The poet says that he could console him that he may get new balls or he could also give him some money to buy another ball. But he stops himself from doing so because he thinks that the money may bring a new ball but will not bring the memories and feelings attached to the lost ball. He further says that the time has come for the boy to learn his responsibilities. Here the poet wants to say that now the boy will learn the toughest lesson of life. The lesson of accepting the harsh realities of life that one day we will lose our loved ones and our loved things.

 

POETIC DEVICES:

1.Alliteration: use of sound ‘b’ at the start of two consecutive words (buys a ball back)
2.Assonance: use of vowel sound ‘e’ (He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes)
3.Repetition: ‘ball’ word is repeated

4. Asyndeton: no use of conjunction in a sentence (A dime, another ball, is worthless)