It felt good. The comfortable weight in one's hand, the smooth, rapid descent down the string, ending with a barely audible snap as the yo-yo hung balanced, spinning pregnant with force and the slave of one's fingertip.
The exquisite beauty of this sentence derives from one thing, the writer's careful matching of the action it descibes with the rhythm or flow or action of the sentence as a pattern of sounds. The sentence comes from Frank Conroy's Stop-Time (1967), the autobiography of his adolescence and for many years his only book. It shows off his great skill.
It may not be possible for me to demonstrate by analysis of every phrase, word, and syllable the pattern of sounds I find in the sentence. You have to read it aloud, both hearing the sound and listening to the sense. It also helps if you have played with a yo-yo and achieved some proficiency. Two observations might be helpful.
First of all, the punctuated sentence is without a subject. The subject would be "it" in the previous sentence, and all of these phrases would refer grammatically to that subject. "Felt good" would follow this string and the two sentences could be punctuated as one. But the effect would be damaged. Conroy wanted to keep his series of phrases separate from "It felt good." That short sentence would not fit the action of the yo-yo, even with only a colon joining it to the phrases.
The other thing that perhaps can be felt in this sentence, especially if you have ever been able to make a yo-yo "sleep," is the effect of the placement of the word "spinning." As Conroy explains, in a proper yo-yo the string is not fastened tight to the axle that joins the two main parts. Rather it ends in a loop that goes round the axle loosely. The yo-yo, when it reaches the end of the string, does not have to come right back up but may spin around inside the loop. The person playing the yo-yo feels it spinning, not going up or down, sleeping. "As the yo-yo hung balanced [comma,pause]spinning [comma,pause]."
If you read the entire sentence aloud with some internalized realization of what the yo-yo is doing, you may appreciate what the sentence does. There aren't many opportunities for a whole sentence to display onomatopoeia, but this is one and Conroy took advantage of it.
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