Friday, April 22, 2016

Poetry Friday: Quintessential Collins

This poem encompasses everything I love about Billy Collins. This is Collins at his most Collinsesque -- witty and self-deprecating while simultaneously offering us exquisitely expressed images as if they were a bouquet of wildflowers, and finishing off with a truth that any lover of words can embrace and affirm. Enjoy!

Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne
by Billy Collins

Every reader loves the way he tells off
the sun, shouting busy old fool
into the English skies even though they
were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.

(Read the whole thing here, at the Poetry Foundation.)

~~~~~

5 comments:

Tabatha said...

Poetry is so concrete and tactile in his work, like an actual living entity. Had to save this to re-read.

jama said...

This one is to save and marvel at over and over. How does he do it?

Linda B said...

Every time I read one of his I wonder of his gift of sharing parts of life, his and others, that connects us all. Beautiful, Karen, thank you.

Mary Lee said...

You had me at "Billy Collins."

Karen Edmisten said...

How does he do it indeed? I agree with all of you -- this is one to keep and reread.