I was looking for an autumn poem, maybe a Thanksgiving poem, and this one landed in my lap. Only a mention of autumn but full of thanksgiving. Billy Collins’ poems do this thing. They point me toward the most ordinary moments, with rapt attention. The thing they do is, to my mind, the most daring of moves — they bypass the sense of writing a poem, or reading one, and simply say how it is, how we know it is, in our own lives. Yet what comes out is a poem after all.
How do I know it’s a poem? Because it celebrates that act of attention, which after all, is love. Because it makes metaphor to help me see better. Because it has no other function than to show me myself, how I can be when I fall in love with random things. Because it has condensed a whole world of concentrated attention into these lines.
Which brings me to the endless question of rhyme & meter vs. what’s called “free verse.” They each do different things. The upside of rhyme and meter is that it can feel like a song. You can remember it easily. It sings in you. The downside is that the repetition of sounds can lull you with its decoration. Sometimes it can feel like all decoration, all public speech. But each does what it does. One isn’t intrinsically better than the other.
I see how well Billy Collins’ poem holds together. Very purposeful even though it feels loose and casual. The wren, but mostly the mouse, holds it together. He sees the mouse the cat had dropped, he notices the mouse’s “light brown suit,” and then he carries it by its tail to the woods. We travel through the speaker’s day, with a “twinge now and then” for the wren who is likely to lose her nest, and for mouse, up until the washing of hands.
One early stanza steps a bit out of the poem to say something that evaluates the situation — the one that begins “This is the best kind of love.”
And one stanza later summarizes how the speaker feels: “But my heart is always propped up/ in a field on its tripod / ready for the next arrow.” That one that wins my heart. Such a perfect metaphor for watching for things to love.
The poem is a panorama of things in an ordinary day. Each line of each stanza feels as if it should be spoken in one breath. As if the speaker’s talking to only you. That’s its beauty.
Billy Collins was Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He has been invited to read at The White House three times, and in 2014 he traveled to Russia as a cultural emissary of the U.S. State Department. He has been called “the most popular poet in America.”