Billy Collins Analysis

Collins uses imagery to depict an image within the readers minds in order to get them emotionally attached to this piece of work. Collin starts off in the first stanza describing the night like a peaceful breeze. He then calmly observes the raindrops dripping slow down his windows until they disappear in “a soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze” (2-3). He then saw this silver glaze on the windows and at this moment he started naming the last names of victims from the 9/11 events. As the list gets up to the letter E for Eberling he stops as the names fall into place as the “droplets fell through the dark” (7). Collins creates this great picture when he states “names printed on the ceiling of the night Names slipping around o a watery bend.

Nearly every line displays some sort of imagery as well as meaning to this image. Another image depicted throughout the text is the writer walking out “barefoot among thousands of flowers heavy with dew like the eyes of tears” (13). Within this meadow of flowers, he looks down at the petals and within the yellow petals there are names inscribed of the victims. As Collins is still in this field he looks up and he sees names “written in the air and stitched into the cloth of the day” (17-18). A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox”, all you can picture is Collins going throughout the day seeing names everywhere he goes, and pictures associated with these names outside the houses these people once lived (19). Everywhere this writer goes throughout his city he keeps seeing names spelled out on the store windows, and of the awnings found throughout the area. Every corner a new name Kelly, Lee, Medina, Nardella and O’Connor. Collins then peers off to take stroll through the woods and amongst the dirt of trail he sees the names of Parker, Quigley, Rizzo, Schubert, Torres and