Contemplations on well known nursery rhymes

You know that feeling when you say a word so often that it sounds weird? Or when you think about something as simple as ‘Why am I in this room?’ for so long that you start to doubt whether you really exist? I do, and so does Billy Collins. In his contemplative poem 'I Chop Some Parsley While listening to Art Blakey's version of 'Three Blind Mice'' from his poetic collection ‘Picnic, Lightning’ this is exactly what he describes.

While he stands in the kitchen preparing a meal of which the only known ingredients are onions and parsley and listens to jazz he starts to think about why our well known nursery rhymes tell stories of pain and emotional turmoil for the little mammals. He says he ‘started to wonder how they came to be blind.’ This is in the first line of the poem (which also cunningly just runs on from the title) as a reader you would immediately be captivated. Finally! Someone who understands the questions you have been asking yourself as you sang this very nursery rhyme to the little kids in kindergarten.

The whole poem seems to be a stream of consciousness. Every line is just running on from the previous stanza as the narrator starts to feel emotional about these poor little mice ‘without tails to trail through the moist grass [...].’ This flow of emotions is emphasised by the fact that it seems to be that the poet has tried to organise the poem into stanzas, however despite his attempt to keep calm he can’t keep the lines in the right place, he just lets them go on and over into the next stanza instead of trying to tame them to fit them into the stanza they were supposed to be in. This adds to the reader’s empathy for the narrator. The shape of the poem on the page is almost crazily disorganised too: the lines are all uneven lengths, some as short as two words (‘If not,’). It’s almost as if the whole poem is just a thought that came to the poets mind as he was cooking and decided it absolutely must be written down that instance. This is a characteristic of Billy Collins’ poems, in fact the poet himself even said in an interview that he never spent more than half an hour writing a poem, and oftentimes doesn’t read through it afterwards either.

The intense imagery that Collins uses to describe what he thinks could have possibly happened to the poor little blind mice is also quite heart wrenching: ‘[W]as it a common accident, all three caught in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?’ His use of the word ‘searing’ makes a reader flinch because you associate it to times when you perhaps accidentally touched a hot pan and pulled away, you start to imagine how it would feel if you didn’t pull your hand away, and start to look deeper into the sad nursery rhyme. He also uses strong emotion to show how the narrator is split into two parts – the cynic and the rest of him. The cynic, after having listened to the story of how the mice came to be blind, tries to walk away to ‘hide the rising softness he feels inside him.’ It is as though this simple tale made him emotional and embarrassed because of this unexpected emotion. A reader would probably feel the same way. After having read the poem I started to also feel uncomfortable and saddened at the thought of these poor little blind mice ‘without eyes and now without tails,’ but this is an odd thing to feel sad about so I too would hide it. The other part of the poet, the non-cynical part that doesn’t accept this cruelty onto the mice, also shows signs of desperation to hide the sadness felt after thinking about their fate. He says the onion he is now cutting ‘might account for the stinging in [his] own eyes.’

All in all, I think this is a wonderfully thought-provoking poem. After reading it I felt almost relieved that someone actually bothered to write about something as seemingly trivial as the lyrics to ‘Three Blind Mice.’ I can’t say that I was happy after reading about what their possible story could be, but I definitely thoroughly enjoyed the poem.   

Oh also - Here is an awesome picture of Art Blakey: