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:
Poetry is so concrete and tactile in his work, like an actual living entity. Had to save this to re-read.
This one is to save and marvel at over and over. How does he do it?
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.
You had me at "Billy Collins."
How does he do it indeed? I agree with all of you -- this is one to keep and reread.
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