1. marginalia
Analysis
"Marginalia" is about the notes and scribbles people write in the margins of books as they read. However, as with most of Billy Collins' poetry, it is also about much more. He gets us in with a humorous tone, talking about the funny things we write in the margins. But at the end he is talking about a woman spilling egg salad on the page. What is going on here?
I think "Marginalia" ends like this because Collins is saying something deep about the way people interact with authors. In a way, Collins connected with that long-dead girl in the same way authors communicate with readers, though his connection wasn't intentional. She gave him something of her humanity, shared a glimpse of her experience with J.D. Salinger with that little egg salad stain and the joyous, if a little cryptic, proclamation of young love.
This poem reminds me of being in college and writing in the margins of the things I was reading. But it also made me think of the practice of reading in general. It gave me chills at the end!
Marginalia
by Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
'Nonsense.' 'Please! ' 'HA! ! ' -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote 'Don't be a ninny'
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls 'Metaphor' next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of 'Irony'
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
'Absolutely,' they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
'Yes.' 'Bull's-eye.' 'My man! '
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written 'Man vs. Nature'
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.'
"Marginalia" is about the notes and scribbles people write in the margins of books as they read. However, as with most of Billy Collins' poetry, it is also about much more. He gets us in with a humorous tone, talking about the funny things we write in the margins. But at the end he is talking about a woman spilling egg salad on the page. What is going on here?
I think "Marginalia" ends like this because Collins is saying something deep about the way people interact with authors. In a way, Collins connected with that long-dead girl in the same way authors communicate with readers, though his connection wasn't intentional. She gave him something of her humanity, shared a glimpse of her experience with J.D. Salinger with that little egg salad stain and the joyous, if a little cryptic, proclamation of young love.
This poem reminds me of being in college and writing in the margins of the things I was reading. But it also made me think of the practice of reading in general. It gave me chills at the end!
Marginalia
by Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
'Nonsense.' 'Please! ' 'HA! ! ' -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote 'Don't be a ninny'
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls 'Metaphor' next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of 'Irony'
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
'Absolutely,' they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
'Yes.' 'Bull's-eye.' 'My man! '
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written 'Man vs. Nature'
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.'
2. Another Reason why I don't keep a gun in the house
Analysis
"Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House" seems like a funny little poem about a dog annoying a guy, and him being glad he doesn't have a gun. He's glad he doesn't have a gun because, presumably, he is so annoyed that he might go out and shoot the dog.
By the end of the poem, though, we have a little something extra. He is talking about Beethoven. He's transformed the dog barking into a kind of music, and saying the barking is the kind of thing that made Beethoven such a genius. Perhaps there is music in nature after all, and maybe the author is finding beauty in an ostensibly annoying sound.
This poem reminds me of our house in Maryland, where we had an annoyingly yipping dog living next door. It would yip and yip for hours and just drive me insane. I was never able to imagine this dog as part of a symphony. But then, I'm not a poet like Billy Collins.
Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House
by Billy Collins
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,
and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.
When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton
while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.
"Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House" seems like a funny little poem about a dog annoying a guy, and him being glad he doesn't have a gun. He's glad he doesn't have a gun because, presumably, he is so annoyed that he might go out and shoot the dog.
By the end of the poem, though, we have a little something extra. He is talking about Beethoven. He's transformed the dog barking into a kind of music, and saying the barking is the kind of thing that made Beethoven such a genius. Perhaps there is music in nature after all, and maybe the author is finding beauty in an ostensibly annoying sound.
This poem reminds me of our house in Maryland, where we had an annoyingly yipping dog living next door. It would yip and yip for hours and just drive me insane. I was never able to imagine this dog as part of a symphony. But then, I'm not a poet like Billy Collins.
Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House
by Billy Collins
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.
The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,
and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.
When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton
while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.
3. forgetfulness
Analysis
"Forgetfulness" is about the way things slip from our minds as we go through life. He hints at the process of dementia, or old-age memory loss, but I think he's talking about the process of forgetting at all ages, the way the brain discards facts we don't use in favor of the really important information.
It ends with a disturbing scene of someone waking up at night to look up an old fact he once knew. I think Collins is describing the fear we all have of losing our memories. This is very moving because, in a way, we are our memories, and so to lose things we once knew is to lose a part of ourselves.
This poem makes me think about the painting below called, "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali. It is a surreal painting that kind of looks like the weird stuff your mind conjures up, and also the way your memory can warp the truth over time, just like those clocks are being warped by whatever force is acting upon that painting.
This poem is funny, but it presents a real issue that I wrestle with all the time. What have I forgotten? Is there stuff I don't know I don't know but should know? Aaaaarrrrghhhh!!!
Forgetfulness
by Billy Collins
The name of the author is
the first to go obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
"Forgetfulness" is about the way things slip from our minds as we go through life. He hints at the process of dementia, or old-age memory loss, but I think he's talking about the process of forgetting at all ages, the way the brain discards facts we don't use in favor of the really important information.
It ends with a disturbing scene of someone waking up at night to look up an old fact he once knew. I think Collins is describing the fear we all have of losing our memories. This is very moving because, in a way, we are our memories, and so to lose things we once knew is to lose a part of ourselves.
This poem makes me think about the painting below called, "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali. It is a surreal painting that kind of looks like the weird stuff your mind conjures up, and also the way your memory can warp the truth over time, just like those clocks are being warped by whatever force is acting upon that painting.
This poem is funny, but it presents a real issue that I wrestle with all the time. What have I forgotten? Is there stuff I don't know I don't know but should know? Aaaaarrrrghhhh!!!
Forgetfulness
by Billy Collins
The name of the author is
the first to go obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.