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Billy Collins The History Teacher Essay

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Life can often be shaped based on the truths and extended truths that people are taught throughout their life. Billy Collins’ “The History Teacher” discusses the distorted truths that a history teacher gives to his students in an attempt to shield them from the harshness that history has revealed. The allusions throughout the poem stand to depict what the main character should be teaching, while the understatements point out the untruths the students are actually learning.
The untruth the students are taught truly becomes revealed through the understatements throughout the poem as the teacher attempts to shield his students, ignorant of their cruel actions, which inevitably demonstrates the speaker’s criticism. The understatements throughout …show more content…

In describing the War of the Roses, the teacher claims that it “took place in a garden” (Collins 11). This play on words of roses in a garden is rather comical, but so far from the truth that the speaker must have included it to point out the danger of these untruths. Furthermore, the material on one of the most horrifying events in history was simply relayed as “the Spanish Inquisition was nothing more than an outbreak of questions” (Collins 7-8). Again, the teacher utilized the common meaning of inquisition and interpreted it into the questions of the time. However, due to the terror of the true event, the understated event through the phrase, “was nothing more than” reveals the criticism the speaker holds as a sign of disrespect to the carnage (Collins 7). The understatement of the Spanish Inquisition progresses as one of the questions is exemplified as “‘what do you call the matador’s hat?’” (Collins 10). In assessing what is normally associated with the country Spain, bull fighting, the teacher comically transformed the event into an understated version, yet this image still is adversarial to the real incident and demonstrates from the speaker that the Spanish Inquisition was not about a silly hat. The humorous substitutions of the true events reveal the speaker’s inner feelings about these actions from a negative

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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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