18 pages • 36 minutes read
Kobe BryantDear Basketball
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The poem is in free verse. As the name indicates, Kobe Bryant is free to give his poem the form he wants. The lines don’t have to contain a set amount of beats (pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables), and the lines don’t have to rhyme. The open form allows Bryant to be open not only with the reader but also his subject, basketball. In free verse, he can express himself freely. He can follow his emotions instead of a predetermined template. While the breakup is relatively straightforward, the emotions behind the split—the feelings that define Bryant’s deep love for basketball—can be messy. By mixing short lines with long lines and creating stanzas of various lengths, Bryant remains true to his feelings. He doesn’t have to circumscribe them.
Basketball makes Bryant run, and the form mimics the act of running. For longer lines (Line 40), Bryant runs bigger distances. With shorter lines (Lines 1, 17, 37), Bryant runs smaller distances. The absence of a predetermined meter furthers the running symbolism. Bryant runs without a specific destination—he just has to keep running on the court and after loose balls.
The lines follow the flow of basketball, and to play basketball, to make “game-winning shots” (Line 5), a player must improvise. They can’t always rely on the head coach to diagram the perfect play. On the court, they have to figure out how to get open and put the ball in the basketball hoop. The free-verse form mirrors the improvisation that Bryant had to possess to flourish in the NBA.
Personification
Personification is a literary device where the author turns a nonhuman object into a human. In other words, they give them human attributes and portray them as a person. In “Dear Basketball,” Bryant uses personification to turn basketball into a human. He gives basketball a personal pronoun, a “you,” so he can write a letter to basketball as if it was a person capable of receiving a letter and understanding the feelings and emotions in that letter.
By personifying basketball, the sport, in the context of the poem, is depicted as Bryant’s one true love. He tells basketball, “I fell in love with you // A love so deep I gave you my all” (Lines 8-9). He also gives basketball a voice, claiming, “YOU called me” (Line 25). It’s as if Bryant and basketball are in an intense love affair, with basketball having most (but not all) of the power. Bryant sacrifices his health for basketball and runs all over the place to impress it. Intense love is hard to sustain. Love can’t always keep people together, and basketball and Bryant have to break up, though they don’t have to stop loving one another. In the poem, Bryant turns basketball into a person capable of receiving and demanding a visceral form of love.
Repetition
Repetition is a literary device where the author repeats words, images, and other devices to reinforce a theme, symbol, image, or idea. In “Dear Basketball,” Bryant repeats “love” four times (Lines 8, 9, 13, 51) to highlight the theme of love and obsession. To illustrate the depth of his love, Bryant uses the word “deep” (Line 9) and the word “[d]eeply” (Line 13). He also continually repeats “you” (Line 8) to establish personification and emphasize basketball’s agency. The constant appearance of “you” (Line 8) gives basketball a godlike power. Bryant does things for this “you” (Line 8) that people typically do for a higher power. He sacrifices and works hard for basketball, as evinced by the presence of “[r]unning” (Line 16) and “ran” (Lines 17-18).
Bryant also repeats the image of himself as a “six-year-old boy” (Lines 12, 30) pretending to take game-winning shots. This imagery occurs in Stanza 2, returns briefly in Stanzas 5 and 8, and then comes back again in Stanza 10. The repetition of the childhood picture propels the theme of fate and destiny and suggests Bryant’s love for basketball was innocent and not about anything other than pure love.
