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