Becoming artists of ourselves: Billy Collins on true romantic love
The former US Poet Laureate retains romantic awe while tempering it with wit and ironic distance
Billy Collins’s Litany shows how genuine romantic love has to come from a place of healthy emotional independence and a secure self-identity. Like any traditional love poem, it begins by stating all the lovely things that the beloved is identified with in the poet’s mind. However, the strength of the poem lies in the accompanying list of all the things that the beloved is not. This use of negation and reversal gives the poem an ironic wit that makes the beauty of the love in the poem more believable to unromantic readers, but it also says something important about what makes true love possible.
Using the archaic-sounding love-symbolism taken from Belgian poet and essayist Jacques Crickillon, Collins compares his lover to ‘the bread and the knife’ and the ‘crystal goblet and the wine.’ So far so nineteenth century. Collins also compares her to ‘the dew on the morning grass’ and ‘the burning wheel of the sun.’ These powerful images secure the inherent awe and genuine worship the poet feels for his lover, even as he prepares to subvert this hierarchical position. This is important because however ironic Collins gets, his reversals and negations get their impact from the primary sincerity of his love.
The first stanza ends with two domesticated, yet equally powerful, metaphorical images. Collins writes:
‘You are the white apron of the baker and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.’
These are images familiar and everyday, yet they have as much of The Golden Bough in them as any good love poem could hope to have. The ‘white apron of the baker’ evokes centuries of labour and harvest, of humanity in communion—and at war—with the seasons. And the magic of ‘marsh birds suddenly in flight’ conjures up the abrupt flutter and fright we feel on our Sunday walks in nature when the environment suddenly comes to life, a combination of admiration and shock that also characterises erotic love.
In the next stanza, Collins reclaims his private world, by reminding his beloved that there are a number of very fine things that she most certainly cannot be compared to. The opening ‘However,…’ in this stanza is both understated and hilarious, and adds a modern credibility to the poem, making it more palatable to us digital millennials who are proud of our disillusionment. He tells her that she is not ‘the wind in the orchard’, the ‘plums on the counter’, ‘the house of cards’, and above all she is not ‘the pine-scented air.’ In a witty repetition he adds further: ‘There is no way that you are the pine-scented air.’
Part of the joke here is of course the fact that there is no obvious reason that Collins’s lover can be identified with one set of images and not the other. Why is she the dew on the morning grass, but not the pine-scented air, exactly? The point is that the speaker of the poem is drawing a line, and its apparent arbitrariness suggests that he is trying to temper his sense of rapture both in the face of nature and at in being in love. The images serve the mood of the lover, rather than having any inherent parallel or one-to-one representative meaning. However, this does not mean the choice of images is random. They serve to express the ambivalence of love, which demands a merging of identity with the other, but also forces us to know our own psychic boundaries.
The next three stanzas are notable for their rhetorical openings. The first of these begins with ‘it is possible that you are…’ and the poet then goes on to compare the lover to ‘the fish under the bridge’ and ‘the pigeon on the general’s head’ but adds ‘you are not even close/to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.’ The blend of the mundane and the heightened, poetic image here helps to restate the equivocal way these musings are framed, as if Collins has not made up his mind about how much he loves his beloved. This lack of decisiveness demonstrates his powerlessness in the face of love, and the chatty tone hints that he might be deliberately overdoing the understatement.
Next he tells her that ‘a quick look in the mirror’ will show her that she is not the ‘boots in the corner’ or ‘the boat asleep in its boat house,’ and the conversational mode of address is extended further when he he says ‘It might interest you to know’ that he thinks of himself as identical with ‘the sound of rain on the roof’, a ‘shooting star’—as well as paper flying down a street and chestnuts in a basket on a table. The language here is that of a frank but uncertain conversation between two married people, reminding each other of their love but no longer seeing the other as the sum total of all their dreams and hopes. The tension between equivocation and healthy ego-boundaries is satirical, but it is also an honest account of what love is really like, without tossing out romanticism completely.
The final stanza turns the central, deeply poetic image of the ‘bread and the knife’ into a modern, ironical weapon. Collins writes:
‘But don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife. You are still the bread and the knife. You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and — somehow — the wine.’
The beloved in question might start to wonder whether being like the bread and the knife is all that great, especially since the lack of equivocation here betrays a dislike as well as awe and fear. And that wonderfully understated ‘somehow’ evokes not just the scepticism about the power of metaphor, but also the mystery at the heart of that symbol itself. The making of wine is a violent miracle of nature, the creative destruction the Greeks associated with Dionysus. Comparing a lover to wine could be saying many things, whether it is about the intoxicating beauty of the beloved or the messy, explosive alchemy at the heart of erotic passion. So the vague shrug we feel in ‘somehow’ actually helps to express the richness of the image, rather than just hold it at arm’s length.
Collins’s poem takes what could be seen as an overly-romantic set of images and turns them into an ironic statement that goes much further than saying to the beloved: ‘here’s a bunch of lovely things you are like.’ The subversive, plain-spoken tone of voice helps the poet to express the ambivalence, unease and powerlessness of romantic love, all the while retaining the sense of danger and wonder of the original images borrowed from Crickillon. As a result, for all the understatement and emotional distance in this poem, Collins manages to affirm the sacredness of love from a place of healthy self-knowledge and individual identity.