Billy Collins Virtues

The magnificence of virtues as portrayed by grandiose statues as seen in ancient Greek and Roman culture is lost to us today, replaced by the common: what is able to be known by science and a focus on money and the economy. Billy Collins, in his poem “The Death of Allegory” portrays the personifications of these virtues lazing about doing nothing and lacking their symbolic props. Once objects of awe and beauty, the speaker gives the reader a sense that virtues, once revered and seen as noble, are replaced by a focus on the functional ability of people and objects with a focus on personal gain. In many ways, we have to individually craft our own versions of the virtues and seek to embody them lest they disappear from our minds forever, overcome …show more content…
Instead of a “Garden of Mirth,” “Bower of Bliss,” “Valley of Forgiveness,” or “Forest of Despair,” we have installed condos for a functional way of living and are destroying natural environments to make room for artificial ones (18-9). There has been a shift in how humans think exemplified by how we shape our environment and the objects we value. The “abstractions” of Justice, Valor, and Death have in a way become just that, absent in our daily thought (1, 12-4). Here they are portrayed as retired and leisurely living out their miserable lives in anonymity in “a Florida for tropes” (11). There is a note of longing and reminiscing about the past, a nostalgia seen most strongly in the last stanza where the virtues disappear in a storybook-like ending with a sense of …show more content…
We no longer have symbolic representations of virtue “robed and statuesque, in paintings… displaying their capital letters like license plates,” but are instead put in a situation where we as people must embody them or else risk losing them (2-5). I’d like to say that although the romantic versions of virtues have disappeared, we are left with is a world full of small acts of kindness that help us retain a sense of community and compassion for the fellow human being. However, I realize that there is still crime and hardship and bitterness in human relationships that riddle our places of living which signify the value of mundane objects over the virtuous lifestyle. The poem accurately notes that people now place value in objects that are unobtrusive, or “lowercase,” an exchange that is lamented here (24). Oftentimes, I wonder if it was better during the Renaissance and other golden ages of civilization when virtues were greatly valued in the