The Ball Poem · Class 10 English · First Flight Poetry: 60 flashcards

John Berryman, an American poet. It appears in the poetry section of First Flight.

A ball costs little and another is easily bought — so why is the boy so upset? The poem is the answer.

With two questions and no answer: what the boy is now that he has lost his ball, and what he is to do — the second asked with a stumble.

Because the poem asks what the boy should do and then simply watches him, so that by the end the reader stands in the same unanswered question. It is construction, not a gap.

Free verse — eighteen lines running unbroken, with no stanzas, no rhyme scheme and no fixed metre, and sentences spilling over the line endings.

Because nothing about the moment is orderly. The reading never settles, just as the boy cannot.

It goes bouncing merrily down the street, then merrily over the edge, then it is in the water — and the boy stops moving.

It is used twice in two lines, and the second use is the moment of the disaster. The ball is cheerful at exactly the point where the boy's world comes apart.

That there are other balls. The poem refuses it at once — no use to say it — and the glossary explains those words as suggesting the loss is not important enough to worry about.

Because it tells a grieving person that the grief is out of proportion, and because the thing lost was never the object.

Sadness which greatly affects the boy. The poem calls it an ultimate shaking grief and says it fixes him where he stands.

Stiff. The striking thing is that he is rigid and trembling in the same line — locked and shivering at once, which is exactly what a first shock does.

The poem never says so. There are no tears anywhere in it; the grief is held, physical and behind his eyes, which is worse.

In a harbour — deep, busy water that nobody is going to climb down into. The loss is complete the moment the ball goes over.

Not the water. He is staring all his young days down into the harbour where the ball went — the years the ball was part of.

Yes. The phrase about his young days going down into the harbour shows that the ball was not new but had been with him through those years, and that they have gone with it.

Because what was lost is not the ball but everything the ball had absorbed. A new one is a different object with none of that inside it.

Nothing. He says he would not intrude — he does not step in, does not speak to the boy and does not produce a coin.

The two unanswered opening questions; the repeated 'merrily' and where the second falls; the rejected comfort and why it fails; and the young days going down into the harbour.

The young days going down into the harbour. It is the line that turns a lost toy into a poem about loss.

To enter a situation where one is not welcome. The speaker has judged that his company would not help the boy.

The grief is real and belongs to the boy. The poem has just called it an ultimate shaking grief, and stepping forward would treat it as a small nuisance to be tidied away.

Ten cents in American currency, roughly the price of a ball. The poem calls the coin worthless, and the replacement ball it would buy worthless too.

Because a coin can buy a ball but not the ball. The one in the harbour had years in it, and money does not reach years.

The poem calls the replacement ball worthless as well. It is not about the amount — no sum would do, because the transaction is impossible in principle.

Handing over a coin would teach the boy that a loss is a small inconvenience an adult can undo, at exactly the moment he was about to learn something far more useful. A rescue would prevent the lesson.

No. He is watching closely enough to know exactly what has happened and what the boy feels. His restraint is attention, and it treats the child's grief as deserving to be taken seriously.

Simply the ordinary world in which people own things — not a rich or greedy world. The point is that ownership has loss folded into it: to have something is to be capable of losing it.

Not the duty to look after a ball, but the discovery that what is yours is yours to lose — and that nobody else carries that for you.

No. The poem says he senses his first responsibility, and that word 'first' is the evidence. This is the first time anything of his has gone for good.

Because the textbook asks students to pick out the words that suggest the answer. Without the word 'first', the answer is only an opinion.

Once, near the middle: that people will take balls and balls will always be lost, little boy. It is the only direct address in the poem.

Tender and unsparing at once. He is not being comforted; he is being told the truth.

Literally, nobody will retrieve this ball from a harbour. More importantly, a purchase is not a recovery — you can acquire a ball but you cannot buy back the one that is gone.

Money is outside a person: it sits in a pocket and buys objects. What the boy has lost is inside him — memory, ownership, the first understanding that things go — and nothing external reaches that.

Because it is meant to be unanswerable. It is the pivot on which every refusal in this part of the poem rests.

Compensation. Money is paid for harm all the time, and everybody understands that it is not the same as repair.

Because solving it removes the learning. The poem's speaker is doing exactly that, and the poem approves of him for it.

The grief is private and the boy's own; money cannot buy the ball back, only a ball; and a rescue would prevent the lesson.

On the sentence that money is external — having first explained the world of possessions and quoted the word 'first'.

Well behind his desperate eyes — not in the face at all, but somewhere further back where nobody watching could reach it.

Hopeless, according to the glossary. His eyes hold no expectation of being comforted.

Because the work is happening somewhere a stranger cannot get to. There is no point stepping in, since nothing said from outside would reach it.

The Greek episteme, meaning knowledge, from a word meaning to understand or to know.

The study of the nature of knowledge itself — what knowing is and how it happens.

As understanding what loss is: what it actually means to have lost something.

Because it says he is coming to know something. A feeling is turning into knowledge in front of the reader, which is far more than an account of how he feels.

The mismatch is deliberate. Putting the biggest available word beside the smallest possible event is how the poem tells you that the event is not small at all.

No. He could not say 'epistemology' and probably could not say 'loss'. The poem supplies the vocabulary he does not have, which is why the learning is placed behind his eyes rather than in his thoughts.

The poem's word is 'learning', and it happens well behind the part of him anybody can see. The understanding is arriving, not being reasoned out.

It says that what he is learning is what every person must one day know, and what most know many days — moving from one child to everybody, and from an afternoon to a whole life.

Everybody must learn it at least once, because nobody gets through a life without losing something for good; and most people learn it repeatedly, because after the first time it keeps happening.

Because by the last lines the ball has become every lost thing and the boy has become anybody who has understood that something is not coming back. It is no longer a sad story about a child.

How to stand up — and it is the second time in three lines that the phrase has been used.

He has been fixed where he stands since the ball went in, rigid and trembling, and at some point he must move again.

To face a loss and go on — to carry it and keep living. The poem names it as a skill the boy is learning how to do, not a feeling he is having.

A poem that mentioned it once would be making an observation. A poem that ends on it twice is telling you what the whole eighteen lines were for.

That things which are his can be lost for good; that no money or replacement brings them back; that this will happen again, to him and to everybody; and how to get up and carry on afterwards.

Because the set question asks students to explain it in their own words.

Define epistemology from the Greek root; explain the epistemology of loss; say why the huge word suits the tiny event; quote the universal turn; and end on standing up, both literally and figuratively.