Head And Body Billy Collins Analysis

Once I was able to associate these words to emotions and issues present in everyday life, the poem started to make me feel sad. I began thinking about all of the emotions and feelings that everyone hides as they go about life. For example, how the waitress I see once a week may have an eating disorder, or how the singer I look up to just lost her son, or the businessman who got laid off today. Everyone has their own personal battle that they carry everywhere, at any given moment. This explains why the setting is so plain, since the internal struggles people face affect them even at a bus stop. While each person waits, the waitress may be thinking about how much skinnier the person next to her is. The singer could be remembering when she held her baby. And the business man could be planning how to break the news to his wife. No matter how small, everyone experiences a type of trauma or bad experience, and this poem seemed to show what happens when these emotions become bottled up. No one can help each other because they are so stuck within their own issues. The difficulty helping others reminded me of the idea of having to take care of yourself before being able to take care of others.

Redeployment, a national book award winner by author Phil Klay is a powerful, informative book about the Iraq war. It is composed of twelve incredible stories. The most memorable story for me is titled “Bodies.” The title got my attention emotionally and logically. Making sense of life, to readjust in the civilian world is the main theme of this story, which I believed it is a struggle to find direction to continue to live life and not just exist. Manipulation was another theme that made the process of connecting with people less stressful. However, it was not the most effective method.

mind. It suggest the poet see it as love or nothing and that he was

After reading the Literal translation one might be fairly in touch with the poem and

From controversial events to ordinary life stories, Billy Collins writes about various topics in different perspectives just like a chameleon, changing its colors to fit with its surrounding. Collins talks in a gentle, yet humorous way; he illustrates a profound understanding through a clear observation. His writing style blends humor and solemnity in one entity. Throughout his poetry, Collins demonstrates, in a witty and satirical voice, his insightfulness towards the objects, using numerous poetic devices, especially allusions and metaphors to effectively convey his messages, most of which revolves around the theme of death.

The "heart" in this poem is "restless and rises...sits by herself in kitchen..." (line 7-11). The heart leaves the body of the woman to go to the kitchen to drink warm milk to help calm her and make her sleepy. The heart is the compass inside of you that will point you to our own true north if you just listen to it. It will lead you to enjoyment and save us if we get misplaced. The heart though can be disingenuous and imperfect, so we have to be careful sometimes and look for other things to help us get through what we truly

“since feeling is first” can be defined literally and figuratively. The poem literally talks about a man who is deeply in love. An example would be stanza 1, where the man is trying to show how much he loves his women by telling her that feelings come first and if someone were to pay attention to trivial things then the feelings are not considered to be something deep. On the other hand, the poem figuratively talks about life being sensible if we were to go with the flow, and not thinking about reasons for everything that’s happening in life. For instance ; stanza 1, emphasizes how a person should consider his feelings first to entirely live his life. If he pays attention to minute details in life he may leave a major part in life. If you want to make sense of everything you do, you will fail to understand the true meaning of it. It also compares our life to a paragraph (line 15). In paragraph the ideas should be coherent, but in life there is no logical order. Sometimes lines can overlap in life. The same thing can be repeated over again. The last line “And death i think is no parenthesis”, tells us that death is not an interruption. In paragraphs, parenthesis are interruptions that come in between but in life the only parenthesis is death and it’s a full stop. Death is final and we can’t refrain from death.

The last line in the poem “and since they were not the ones dead, turned to their own affairs” lacks the emotions the reader would expect a person to feel after a death of a close family member. But instead, it carries a neutral tone which implies that death doesn’t even matter anymore because it happened too often that the value of life became really low, these people are too poor so in order to survive, they must move on so that their lives can continue. A horrible sensory image was presented in the poem when the “saw leaped out at the boy’s hand” and is continued throughout the poem when “the boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh…the hand was gone already…and that ended it”, this shows emphasis to the numbness the child felt. The poem continues with the same cold tone without any expression of emotion or feelings included except for pain, which emphasizes the lack of sympathy given. Not only did the death of this child placed no effect on anyone in the society but he was also immediately forgotten as he has left nothing special enough behind for people to remember him, so “since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs”. This proves that life still carries on the same way whether he is present or not, as he is insignificant and that his death

Secondly, the author uses word choice to show the speakers overall sorrow. Throughout the whole poem there are word scattered everywhere that describe the general emotion of sorrow, some of those word being “restless” (19), “torment”, and “troubled” (4). These words instantly give the connotation of feelings like despair and sadness. The speaker also uses literary elements such as simile to express sorrow, like when she says “These troubles of the heart/ are like unwashed clothes” (27, 28). Everyday people usually do not pay much mind to unwashed clothes, and usually look at it as something unimportant or irrelevant. When the speaker compares her internal troubles to something that holds little importance to everyday life and is also seen as unpleasant, the readers really get a look into the sorrow and sadness that the speaker is truly feeling. The speaker also uses word choice to help show the readers the true intensity of what she is going through.

Because the poem is long, it won’t be quoted extensively here, but it is attached at the end of the paper for ease of reference. Instead, the paper will analyze the poetic elements in the work, stanza by stanza. First, because the poem is being read on-line, it’s not possible to say for certain that each stanza is a particular number of lines long. Each of several versions looks different on the screen; that is, there is no pattern to the number of lines in each stanza. However, the stanzas are more like paragraphs in a letter than

The poem begins with two lines which are repeated throughout the poem which convey what the narrator is thinking, they represent the voice in

The second stanza of the poem can be interpreted in many ways. The narrator mentions his fear and how at one point he broke down in tears. To me, this could mean that he is so headstrong about his hatred towards his enemy that it scares him. He couldn’t possibly be scared of his enemy because it was never mentioned that his enemy threatened him. The narrator then starts crying because he never expected to grow so quickly and instead of yelling about his anger, he develops these tears. Just as the unwanted emotions surface, the good emotions come up just as quickly. The narrator smiling could mean that he wants to mask everything with a smile to show his enemy that he’s doing fine. It could also mean that he’s enjoying how everything is unfolding.

This collection of over ninty words is much more than just a poem. It’s a story of millions of people. It ties in rhymes, sadness, happiness, religion and anger though a broad spectrum of other ideas.

Heartbreak can be defined as: overwhelming distress. When a person is heartbroken the deep emotions and stress they feel takes over their life to a point where, sometimes, you can’t function doing anything besides thinking of your own heartbreak. In the poem “Head, Heart,” written by Lydia Davis, it displays a very person conversation between the head and the heart during an emotional time. This poem is very universal, and very personal to almost all people. It is very unlikely that someone would read this poem and not relate to the emotions it conveys. This poem uses personification and menotomy for “head” and “heart” as if they are people. This poem means to show its readers what it’s like on the inside to be heartbroken by something.

In the poem, the beating heart represents the narrator’s extreme guilt and remorse for the murdering of the old man. After the narrator murders