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Billy Collins Introduction To Poetry Essay

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In the definite poem “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins, the narrator enlightens the reader with a valuable directive, stating we must delve deep inside a poem to fully experience it rather than plucking and forcing out the details to determine the meaning. The speaker uses ample amounts of personification and metaphors for the purpose of vividly portraying his authentic emotions towards those who wrongly scrutinize poetry and the right way to read a poem. Imagery is also included to exemplify how a poem is not just a stationary entity, but rather varies based on how the reader interprets it. The speaker uses a sarcastic, yet frustrated tone to demonstrate the shift from his expectations and aspirations of analyzing poetry to the destruction …show more content…

In the first stanza, the speaker asks “them” “to take a poem and…press an ear against its hive” (line 4). The metaphor contributes to the narrator’s opinion on how a poem should be extracted, as how bees extract the purest, sweetest honey from their beehive. In the second stanza, the speaker asks “them” to “feel the walls for a light switch” (line 8) of the poem’s room, ultimately searching for the very core of a poem’s intention. Very often, the reader will attempt to discover the underlying meaning of a poem after one read. “They,” the readers, want to “torture a confession out of it” (line 14) and use the easiest tactics to retrieve the content. By humanizing the poem through personification, it makes us feel something more than frustration. A strong sensation of sympathy toward the poem’s crude treatments quickly arise. On the other hand, personification also brings liveliness to the poem, as the speaker wants “them” “waving at the author’s name on the shore” (line 11). The narrator wants readers to glide over the poem like a waterski would glide over a lake, a metaphor introduced in stanza three, illustrating excitement and activity to the poem. In this instance, he does not want the reader to go any deeper than the surface, rather have them only comprehend the poem in its most basic

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He could imagine his deception of this town “nestled in a paper landscape,” (Collins 534). This image of the speaker shows the first sign of his delusional ideas of the people in his town. Collins create a connection between the speaker’s teacher teaching life and retired life in lines five and six of the poem. These connections are “ chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard,” which compares images that the readers can picture.

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