Nine Horses Billy Collins Analysis

Nine Horses: Concepts without Correlation
“Nine Horses”, by Billy Collins, is a set of poems that address the various problems in today’s world. Each poem tackles an issue in society. For example, “Royal Aristocrat”, talks about the fear of not impacting the world, or not doing anything worthwhile with our lives. Another poem, “Velocity”, teaches the reader to to think into the future, and about how we all speed through our lives. This speeding is what results in the advancement of the human race. The author seems to have an inconsistent pace throughout the poems however, and he fails to establish connections in between the poems, leaving most of the details up to the reader’s imagination. All in all, I was not exactly fond of the entire book.
As mentioned before, the author jumps from topic to topic without establishing a unifying theme or …show more content…
For example, in "Velocity", Collins talks about looking at life from a non-conventional point of view. In "Royal Aristocrat", he talks about feeling useless, and then the urge to feel accomplished in life. He brings up two major themes, without relating them. This really confused me, because at the start I was intrigued by the various interesting themes that Collins was writing about, and then as the book went on; I saw no unifying theme that tied them all together. “Country,” another one of the poems, is an example of his lack of pace; he speaks of paranoia and its effects on people, specifically its creation of madness. He starts the poem off in a rather relaxed tone, and then gradually changes the tone to a more excited and scared one. "I wondered about you, when you told me never to leave a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches lying around the house, because the mice..."