Poem Visualization

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

I love the imagery in his poem and how he effortlessly personifies what a poem should be. In high school I took AP Literature and I really learned to analyze and appreciate poetry. Sometimes however, in my eagerness to dissect the meaning of a poem and squeeze out whatever I could from it, I missed the experience of the poem and did not grasp what the poet wanted the reader to understand. Yes, we can pull out all these metaphors and crazy deep meanings, but that is not always necessary. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is telling us that a poem speaks on its own...we don't need to speak for it.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Call it a cliche Robert Frost poem but I love this poem because it is so nostalgic with its quiet scene. The speaker of the poem however, is torn between watching nature unfold in all its marvel of the woods filling up with snow and the things he must do...things to cross off his list of things to do to put it practically. The allure of nature is so powerful, but the horse serves as a reminder that he has promises to keep and places to go.

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices? 

I read this poem as a senior in high school for my AP Literature class and it really struck a cord in me. How many times have I known and seen my father work hard and not appreciated, thanked, or acknowledged his efforts? In this poem it is a Sunday. Sunday is a time of rest, a time of thanksgiving--the Sabbath day. But still he worked in the "blueblack cold." The speaker is the son who, looking back as an adult, realized his father's love through his own experiences and hardships. More than in a worldly sense however, I compared this father's love to God's love. Jesus who was innocent died on the cross in place of our sins so that we did not have to be punished. Yet how many people take it for granted? Trample on his sacrifice each day?