Posts Tagged poems
A Poem “Introduction to Poetry” – Billy Collins
“Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins
Introduction to Poetry (from poetry 180)
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
————————————————–
This is where I would usually begin my analysis of the poem but I refuse to torture this innocent piece.
Poem Analysis “Funeral Blues” W.H. Auden
Posted by asad123 in Films, Poems, relationships on January 22, 2012
(Poem #256) Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
[If this poem sounds familiar to you, perhaps it is
because an actor reads it dramatically at a funeral
for the man he loves. W. H. Auden also
likely wrote it for a man he deeply loved.
I enjoy the following lines, "He was my North, my South,
my East and West,/ My working week and my Sunday rest."
These are the four cardinal directions.The beloved dominates
his sense of both space and time. This suggests he went
everywhere with him and spent every moment with him.
I hear echoes of a very ancient poem in this Auden piece.
The Roman poet Catullus wrote a love poem in Latin that
resembles this one.
(http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/Latin1000/Readings/1020B/25catullus2.pdf/ ) It almost seems
comical that he goes to such lengths to mourn a little bird,
but this was a pet that his beloved adored.
Not everyone can write a poem like this when someone dies.
Yet there is something about the feeling of the poem that
anyone who has lost a loved one will recognize.]