Concerning Animals - Billy Collins

Billy Collins is a unique poet. His subjects of discussion are far from similar to those of other modern poets. Throughout The Apple that Astonished Paris, Collins repeatedly brings the subject of his poems back to animals. In this essay I will mainly be examining his poem Driving with Animals, bringing in other points from different poems about Animals like Putting Down the Cat or Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House being prime examples.

            To start us off with, in the first stanza Collins uses imagery to show the reader where he is, which is driving through the woods at night; “I drive this road that whips through woods at night.” In this poem he is constantly “searching ahead” for potential road kill he could accidentally run over, mainly deer. In the second stanza, I think Billy Collins is showing how although the car has everything to provide him with maximum comfort, it cannot warn him if he is about to run over an unsuspecting deer innocently grazing; “Measuring motion, pressure, heat, the arcana of the engine, but there is no red needle to indicate the deer.” He uses alliteration as well to exaggerate the feeling of warmth inside the car; "Winter-snug in the warm interior." I think Billy was trying to show that man has tried to make everything better for people, except they have not considered what effect this will have on nature, and they are going to destroy it. In his short but meaningful poem Hunger, he shows an example of nature triumphing over the human race. “The fox you lug over your shoulder in a dark sack has cut a hole with a knife and escaped.” I think this poem also shows how small people are in comparison with Mother Nature. He also humanizes the fox, by saying that it uses a "knife" to escape the human entrapment, which could represent how people should recognize that animals are suppose to be living in unison with the human race, rather then one being superior to the other. I think this poem also shows how small people are in comparison with Mother Nature. “You walk back to your small cottage through a forest that covers the world.”

            In the third stanza of “Driving with Animals” Collins says that if he stares for long enough into the night in front of him, he will “hallucinate shapes in pockets of darkness.” He goes on to say that he will not only see deer if he concentrates hard enough, but other animals like “Bison, zebra, even fish...” One can see clearly what Collins must have been experiencing because he uses astounding imagery like the fish floating in “the dreamy pools of fog.” He then goes on to say that he is seeing “Animals released from the mind’s deep zoo.” This is obviously a metaphor for ones imagination, and how we "release" the animals from it. It is obvious that this stanza is extremely powerful. Collins goes on to explain how we humans see animals everywhere through repetition; “Animals parading through the gardens of Eden, animals on the turning pages of storybooks.” The effect of this repetition is that it adds to the effect of seeing animals repeatedly and everywhere. I think what he is trying to suggest is that nature is vital to the survival of the human race. To continue, Collins then says that he is imagining the deer’s “leaving the sanctuary of woods” to attempt to cross the road, where it will end up being “locked in death-leaps in the sparkle of headlights.” This is suggesting that once the deer is in the headlights of the car, it is doomed to get run over and it has no chance of escape; "death-leaps." Collins is saying that although nature is essential to humans, we keep killing it as if we don’t need it. This can be related to Billy Collins’s poem Another reason I don’t keep a gun in the house. Throughout the poem he talks about the annoying dog that is constantly barking next door. “I can still hear him muffled under the music, barking, barking, barking.” Using repetition on the word Barking, gives the reader and idea of how repetitive and annoying the actual dog must have been to Collins. Furthermore, Considering the title of the poem, it is suggesting that if he had a firearm in his possession, he would gladly use it on the annoying canine that resides next-door. One also starts to wonder what the first reason Collins wouldn’t keep a gun in the house is, which is quite scary to be honest. This proves his point he is trying to make in Driving with animals, saying that humans would gladly eradicate nature for their own benefits. Once Collins reaches home from his drive in the woods, he says that he will still be imagining the deer all over his house. "I will feel these rhythms in the quiet of the house. I will see the heads of deer in the darkened bedroom." He uses repetition yet again, to exaggerate the Deers he keeps seeing over and over again wherever he goes. 
            Conclusively, I think Collins is trying to suggest that nature is a gratuity, and humans shouldn’t throw it away with such disregard as they are doing now. He shows us in the last stanza how much he appreciates nature, saying that he will "dream of the sensational touch of a buck's fur" and how he will "rock to sleep in the bow and lift of antlers." If humans stop messing around with nature and learn to appreciate it more, then the planet will replenish itself back to its normal state.