Marginalia

As the book travels through life, picking up notes and spills and tear stains, it becomes a way for the reader to communicate with not only the thoughts of the author, but with all the things left behind by those other readers.

A Modest Proposal, mentioned in stanza 3, is a satirical essay from 1729, where Jonathan Swift suggests that the Irish eat their own children. Collins adds his sarcasm and humor by adding "Another notes the presence of 'Irony' fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.”

Collins' line "'Absolutely,' they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin,' is a reference to the two authors. Duns Scotus was a philosopher in the high middle ages, and James Baldwin was an author who primarily focused on racism in the 1920's.

 

He is using the shore (in stanza 3) as the edges of the paper or the margins much as how you would see when you go to the beach. The reference to the shore provides imagery of hundreds of peoples footprints all around, but disappear once the water touches the shore. 

‘Yet the one I think of most often,

The one that dangles from me like a locket,

Was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye

I borrowed from the local library

One slow, hot summer.’

The speaker here recalls his favorite annotation, a margin note in J.D. Sallinger’s A Catcher in the Rye (1951).

He describes his memory of reading the annotation through the simile of a “locket,” like a precious treasure.













‘A few greasy looking smears
And next to them, written in soft pencil-
By a beautiful girl, I could tell,
Whom I would never meet-
‘Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.’

The poem climaxes with a description of a marginal note that the speaker remembers in a library book, and that he imagines was written by a beautiful girl.

On the other hand, it’s possible that the note referred to some real-life person the girl was in love with. Whether it’s two lovers brought together through a favorite book or a love affair between reader and character, it’s also a metaphor for the love of reading more broadly.

After reading over the poem again I realized that we do the same thing in school. I jot down what comes to my head on the margins of the book, writing what I think is the meaning of the sentence or the metaphor or whatever comes up. The next person who gets my book will be lucky enough to read my ideas and know why I came up with them.