Project 1: "The Beautiful Game" Poem

                           For my first project I chose to focus on a poem titled “The Beautiful Game”. The poem was published in 2013 by Joseph Furdeck. The sport of soccer has always been referred to as “the beautiful game” because of its’ immense popularity all across the globe. The poem has a serious tone, and a detail of it that I found interesting was that it did not mention once that the sport being talked about was soccer. It describes the feeling that a soccer player feels when he or she steps onto the field before a game. I have played soccer all my life, so the description of the field and the feeling of energy that he describes is very familiar to me. I feel the author’s passion for the game throughout the poem, in particular the couple of lines that state, “This is our fight, It is our moment, it is what we know, What we live for”. An intensity that only a devoted athlete would have is felt throughout the poem by the diction the author utilizes. He compares the game between two teams as a battle and a fight. In this poem the sport of soccer is not simply a sport, but rather a fierce contest in which no player wants to be part of the team that emerges as the loser at the finale. The author also demonstrates a sort of competitive sportsmanship in which he admits that there is no doubt that he is the most determined to come out victorious, but he also describes looking over to this opponents in the pre-game and he notices the same determined expressions in their faces and body that he possesses. This poem is not very long at all, but it covers pretty much every part of what a soccer player experiences building up to a very important and crucial match. He begins the poem with a stanza describing how he was born to play the game and be the best at it. He goes on to share the long time he has been practicing the game before leading up to the point in which he is at now. The entire poem describes a person who obviously has love for the game, but more than anything a person who has an obsession with winning and being the best at what he does which is the mentality of a true athlete. The only true indication of simply loving to play the game is how he both begins the poem and ends it. He begins it and ends it with the simple line, “The Beautiful Game”. That is definitely the most powerful line of the poem because he goes on to describe his passion and his immense competitiveness he has for the game before he finishes it off again by describing it as simply beautiful above anything else.