Introduction To Poetry Billy Collins Analysis

Introduction To Poetry Paragraph
“Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins is a poem that advises readers how to approach and analyze a poem. In the first stanza of the poem, “I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a colour slide,” there is a perception of who the speaker and the audience might be. The speaker of this poem is Collins or perhaps a teacher speaking to an audience (readers or students) that’s indicated by “them”. A simile in this stanza is used to compare a poem to a colour slide; the colour slide is just a picture. Both a poem and picture is considered art that is observed. The second stanza is one line, “Or press an ear against its hive.” Pressing an ear against a hive (beehive), a buzzing sound can be heard. This implies that readers should listen …show more content…
In the third stanza it says, “I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out.” It seems to be a metaphor of how poems can be complicated and difficult to understand. A mouse probing its way out of a poem is lost and confused. This would be similar to a reader who’s struggling to grasp meaning of a poem. The fourth stanza says, “Or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.” Similar to the third stanza, the fourth stanza is also a metaphor of the difficulty of understanding poems. In this case, the room is a poem and the light switch is the meaning of the poem. If the reader was to walk into a room, assuming it was pitch black, and feel the walls to find a light switch; that’s fairly challenging. Stanza five implies what the speaker suggests the readers should do to properly analyze a poem. It says, “I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.” Waterski across the surface of a poem hints to read the poem as it is. The surface of the poem would be the exterior, the speaker wants the readers to only focus on the words they are reading. This includes