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10/31/2020 HUM-200 - Page 1.3.4 - Reading Collins

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Applied Humanities

Learning to Read Reading Collins By Eric Steineger 1 Module One: Introduction to the Humanities / Page 1.3.4 Reading Collins On this page: 0 of 2 attempted (0%) Objective: Use the strategies employed in the previous pages to analyze a poem by Billy Collins.

Perhaps easier to comprehend than Plath’s “Stars Over the Dordogne,” Billy Collins’s “The Art of Drowning” focuses on a familiar trope: the notion that, just before dying, one’s life will flash before one’s eyes. Right away, we notice that the tone of this poem differs from the previous one. It seems inquisitive and lighthearted, like the poem is not taking itself seriously. Instead of grimacing through the final moments of your life, Collins asks the reader, “wouldn’t you hope for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand / turning the pages of an album of photographs— / you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.” This is not the desperate summation we expect.

Analyze a Poem

On this page, you will use the strategies you’ve learned to analyze a poem by Billy Collins. Answer the questions as you analyze the poem.

Before you begin, remember the tips offered on the earlier page about how to read literature:

1. Don’t Be Intimidated 2. Read the Poem Aloud 3. Establish Context 4. Identify Key Aspects 5. Form an Impression

To help guide your analysis of this poem, consider the following question:

How much time does Collins spend on conjecture—i.e., what drowning is like in the final moments—versus the probable outcome?

The Art of Drowning

10/31/2020 HUM-200 - Page 1.3.4 - Reading Collins

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By Billy Collins

I wonder how it all got started, this business about seeing your life flash before your eyes while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence, could startle time into such compression, crushing decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn’t you hope for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand turning the pages of an album of photographs— you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation? Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph? Wouldn’t any form be better than this sudden flash? Your whole existence going off in your face in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography— nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance here, some bolt of truth forking across the water, an ultimate Light before all the lights go out, dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage. But if something does flash before your eyes as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away, having nothing to do with your life or your death. The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom, leaving behind what you have already forgotten, the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

“The Art of Drowning” from The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins, © 1995. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Short-Answer Question

What can you say about the structure of this poem? Do any of the stanzas group together into a larger section? Do the ideas suggest that some of the

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stanzas could be divided into more than one chunk? Where is the “middle” of the poem?

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Part of the attraction of poetry is that it can transport us via imagery, narrative, facility with language, or any combination of poetic elements. Good poetry also leaves something for the reader to interpret. Indeed, Collins could have told us how to feel in this poem (i.e., this is what happens in your final moments), but he doesn’t. Instead, he poses questions: “I wonder how it all got started, this business / about seeing your life flash before your eyes / while you drown.” So we fill in the blanks.

The first three stanzas feel self-contained, meaning one idea or a series of related ideas are expressed to completion. The final two stanzas, however, use enjambment, or the continuing of a line into the next line or even the next stanza. We see this “run-on” effect most clearly in the sentence that starts with the line “But if something does flash before your eyes” and offers an idea that stretches through the end of the fourth stanza and into the final stanza.

Now, this is key: How would you contrast Collins’s ideas about drowning in the conclusion with the rhetorical questions posed at the beginning of the poem?

Some may call Collins a cynic, others a realist. Many are charmed by his poetry, hence his status as one of the best-selling poets of the 1990s and 2000s. But what is undeniable is Collins’s ability to penetrate the minutiae of everyday life, to offer surprising, serious, and sometimes hilarious insights into what makes us human, flaws and all.

Response Board What’s your initial impression of the narrator (or the poet)? What kind of person is he? What would you expect from a conversation with him?

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