“Introduction to Poetry”

The disappointment of Billy Collins is dripping out of the metaphors and simile in “Introduction to Poetry”. The speaker just wants his students to see what he sees in poems. The poems are full of adventure and thinly veiled excitement, if only his students could break through the skin and see it. He draws a comparison to a color slide which is dark and ominous at first glance but once you investigate and hold it up to the light, the vibrant picture shines through. Sometimes however, the poem is more like a beehive, full of pent-up energy just waiting to be released. A poem can be vague and most of the time it takes a lot of searching to find the real meaning. The speaker wants his students to know that there is always a meaning. There is always a light switch even if one needs to “walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch.“ A poem can also be very fun like waterskiing but at the same time, be much deeper than it seems like the lake below the waterskier. Please, for the sake of Billy Collins, don’t try to torture poems, just follow the advice of his metaphors and tease the meaning out of them.

"The Blue Bowl"

Jane Kenyon sounds sad and depressed while keeping “The Blue Bowl” chock full of symbols representing the death of her cat. To begin with, the speaker calls the buriers ‘primitives’, this is a reference to the Egyptians that worshipped cats just as she loved her own. The “white feathers between his toes” are symbolic of an angel’s wings and his “aquiline nose” shows freedom in death. Storms are used to reflect one’s emotions and the storm of that night is no different. However, when it clears in the morning, the speaker regrets burying the blue bowl with the cat. This can be seen from the dripping, or crying, bush that the robin is in. Robins are unique for their blue eggs which symbolizes the blue bowl that the bush, or speaker, is crying over. The clincher here is the simile at the end that the neighbor was well intentioned as was the burier but in the end did the wrong thing just as the burier did. All of these symbols clearly point to the speaker’s sorrow over the death of her cat.