THE FIRST DREAM BY BILLY COLLINS

The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.

After reading the title, where do you think we are going?

1.    1.  It’s     a trip into the dream. 

 What sort of trip do you think this will be? Does sound fun?   

2.       No it sounds scary because “the wind is ghosting around the house tonight” and the night is filled with uncertainty.

After reading the first stanza, where do we seem to be going?

3.       Not sure but I think we seem to be going into the dream as “I begin to think of the first person

To dream”.

What sight do we see?

4.       Imagery of  fire , rocks and a lake

Where will we go next?

5.       We will go to the lake to reflect about life.

Do we need special clothes? What kind? Are they comfortable?

6.       Not really when we feel cold we will just “stand around the fire and drape ourselves in the skins of animals”

Who do we meet along the way or who goes with us?

7.       We meet a beast and how one of us “had put his arms around the neck” but the rest of us “could touch only after they had killed it with stones”

What time have we travel led to? How do we feel here?

8.       We travel to the Stone Age “long before the invention of consonants” we feel savage following basic instincts.

What is the climate like? Does the weather change during our journey or does it stay the same throughout?

9.       We do not care we are savage beasts who do whatever it takes to survive.

Where do we arrive next? What is the next place like? Is it fun?

10.   Next we arrive into the hands of our lover. “Then again, the first dream could have come to a woman”

Whom do we meet?

11.   We meet desire in lust in form of a woman.

What do people seem to be doing?

12.   The woman seems to be sitting in misery shown by “the tilt of her downcast head” that “make her appear to be terribly alone.”

Where have we arrived at the end? What kind of place is this? How does it compare to the place where we going?

13.   We have arrived at the point of realization of what its truly like to love someone completely and holy and be swayed by their emotions  and “you might have gone down as the first person to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.”

ARISTOTLE by Billy Collins.

This is the beginning.

Almost anything can happen.

This is where you find

the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,

the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.

Think of an egg, the letter A,

a woman ironing on a bare stage

as the heavy curtain rises.

This is the very beginning.

The first-person narrator introduces himself,

tells us about his lineage.

The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.

Here the climbers are studying a map

or pulling on their long woolen socks.

This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.

The profile of an animal is being smeared

on the wall of a cave,

and you have not yet learned to crawl.

This is the opening, the gambit,

a pawn moving forward an inch.

This is your first night with her,

your first night without her.

This is the first part

where the wheels begin to turn,

where the elevator begins its ascent,

before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.

Things have had time to get complicated,

messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.

Cities have sprouted up along the rivers

teeming with people at cross-purposes—

a million schemes, a million wild looks.

Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack

here and pitches his ragged tent.

This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,

where the action suddenly reverses

or swerves off in an outrageous direction.

Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph

to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.

Someone hides a letter under a pillow.

Here the aria rises to a pitch,

a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.

And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge

halfway up the mountain.

This is the bridge, the painful modulation.

This is the thick of things.

So much is crowded into the middle—

the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,

Russian uniforms, noisy parties,

lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—

too much to name, too much to think about.

And this is the end,

the car running out of road,

the river losing its name in an ocean,

the long nose of the photographed horse

touching the white electronic line.

This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,

the empty wheelchair,

and pigeons floating down in the evening.

Here the stage is littered with bodies,

the narrator leads the characters to their cells,

and the climbers are in their graves.

It is me hitting the period

and you closing the book.

It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen

and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.

This is the final bit

thinning away to nothing.

This is the end, according to Aristotle,

what we have all been waiting for,

what everything comes down to,

the destination we cannot help imagining,

a streak of light in the sky,

a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

A Billy Collins Lesson: Reading like a tourist.
1 After reading the title, where do you think we are going?

     The title of the poem is Aristotle. Aristotle is a well renowned philosopher so I'm guessing we are going on a journey of life reflecting all the decisions we made and the ones we will wisely choose in the future. It seems more serious and reflective of ones decisions, bad decisions and that's not fun.

2. After reading the first stanza, where do we seem to be going?

   We have just been born and we are going to discover the wonders of life, what it is to be alive, we are going to going to be something extraordinary... a human being.

We are going deep into the histories of past times, "This is early on, years before the ark, dawn."

3. What sights do we see?

   We see curtains symbolising the beginning of the day. We see alot as "the mezzo-soprano stands in the wings" symbolising the creation of music as an art form that brings harmony into life.

Here we see the beginning of every feeling, situation and practice that ever came to be.

4. Where will we go next?
 
   Next we go into adolescence separated from adulthood by a thin line of perceptions and ignorance set by society that choses to disregard the youthful young innovators of our century.

5.  Do we need special clothes?, What kind? Are they comfortable?

   Social media, culture and religion influence what we wear.

Most of the  times social media  promotes clothes that are exposing and degrading especially for women.

6. Whom do we meet along the way or who goes with us?

   We then know pain, we meet friends who turn into enemies and disappointment that stretches out as far as the Atlantic ocean. We befriend revenge and his heartless mother betrayal.

7. Are there unfamiliar words we need to translate during thus trip?

  Aria- any expressive melody made by one voice with or without orchestral accompaniment usually in operas.

8. Do we travel in time? What time have we travelled  to?

  We have travelled through the beginning, the middle and the end of time. We feel as if everything we have done has amounted to nothing and everything. We were born to die. Nothing lasts forever, death is inevitable no matter what you do.

9. Does the weather change?

The weather changes throughout the journey; physically as we travel to different countries “the guitars of Spain,” “Russian uniforms” and metaphorically as the cold feeling we get when we are betrayed or shut out by someone or the warm feeling when we connect with a soul we feel we have known a lifetime ago.

10. Where have arrived next?

  

      “This is the end,” Whether it’s fun or not depends on you and how you take it. 

11. Whom do we meet here?

     Here we meet the ‘dark of ages past’. All our regrets and fears come true in due time.

12. What do the people seem to be doing?

   People seem to be forgetting but yet they remember their youth. What it was like to be in love and be able to run at full speed.

Invective- Billy Collins 

from the title, where do you think we are going?

Rome. invective is a form of classical libel used in Roman polemical verse.

*Libel-type of poetry from the renaissance.*

what sort of trip do you think this ill be?

a trip through time, alone. to a simpler place where we feel more at peace with ourselves.

after the first stanza where do we seem to be going?

ancient ROME.

what sights do we see? 

parallel columns

grassy fields

where do we go next?

western ninth century Ireland.

who goes with us? 

we go alone.

do we meet animals?

badgers, fish, deer and birds

I love the contrast between the warm Rome and cold Ireland. this expresses the different types of people there are, the different locations people bring themselves to. 

by Elsa Rottjers 

Invective- Billy Collins

Turn away from me, you, and get lost in the past.

Back to ancient Rome you go, with its parallel columns and syllogisms.

Stuff yourself with berries, ea lying on your side.

Suck balls of snow carried down from the Alps for dessert.

I don’t care. I am leaving too, but for the margins of history,

To a western corner of ninth century Ireland I go,

to a vanishing, grey country far beyond your call.

There I will dwell with badgers, fish and deer,

birds piercing the air and the sound of little bells.

I will stand in pastures of watercress by the salmon-lashing sea.

I will stare into the cold, unblinking eyes of cows.

THE TRIP INTO DEATH.

                                                

In the old days news of it traveled by foot.

An aproned woman would wave to her husband 

as he receded down the lane, hauling

the stone of the message.

Or someone would bring it out by horse,

a boy galloping, an old man trotting along.

A girl would part a curtain wondering

what anyone would be doing here at this hour,

as he dismounted, hitched the best to a post,

then lifted the brass knocker, cold as the night.

But today we have the telephone.

You can hear one from where you are right now,

its hammer almost touching the little bell,

ready to summon you, ready to fall from your hand.

                                                                       ---------

• This trip would be filled with reminiscing, I’m not sure if it’ll be fun it all depends on the perspective in which we’re looking at it from.
• You’ll see sadness and despair. You’ll see hearts breaking that you’ll never be able to fix.
• We will travel back in time, back to the days where hope and anticipation's all anyone ever had. And then will come back to this time, time when all heart breaks are only one phone call away.
• In the end we’ll arrive at her house. Standing right outside her kitchen window watching her make that cup of coffee, happy, smiling, not knowing that it’s all about to fade away. Her life about to change. 
• The weather will be dark in both locations, a rainy and very morning. The air icy, almost deadly. 
• The only three words you need to understand are Pain, Despair & Loss. 

A History of Weather BIlly Collins

A History of Weather

It is the kind of spring morning -candid sunlight
elucidating the air, a flower-ruffling breeze-
that makes me want to begin a history of weather,
a ten-volume elegy for the atmospheres of the past,
the envelopes that have moved around the moving globe.

It will open by examining the cirrus clouds
that are now sweeping over this house into the next state,
and every chapter will step backwards in time
to illustrate the rain that fell on battlefields
and the winds that attended beheadings, coronations.

The snow flurries of Victorian London will be surveyed
along with the gales that blew off Renaissance caps.
The tornadoes of the middle Ages will be explicated
and the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages.
There will be a section on the frozen nights of antiquity
and on the heat shimmered in the deserts of the Bible.

The study will be hailed as ambitious and definitive,
for it will cover even the climate before the Flood
when showers moistened Eden and will conclude
with the mysteries of the weather before history
when unseen clouds drifted over an unpeopled world,
when not a soul lay in any of earth's open meadows gazing up
at the passing of enormous faces and animal shapes,
his jacket bunched into a pillow, an open book on his chest.


After reading the title and first stanza where do you think we are going?
I don't think we are going anywhere, I think we are staying right here in the "candid sunlight" feeling the "flower ruffling breeze". Actually its the nicest day we have had in a while.

As the poem progresses are we taken anywhere else?
It turns out i was wrong. I thought we were enjoying the drifting "cirrus clouds that are now sweeping over this house", they're my favourite kind of clouds! But apparently we're going back in time, through the 'The History of Weather' . Honestly, I have not a clue what to expect!

Do we need special clothes? What kind?
To be honest I don't know what I should have brought with me but I have carried all I could manage. But now that we have been greeted by the "rain" and the "winds that attended beheadings, coronations" and the "snow flurries of  Victorian London" I wish I had dressed more appropriately in the presence of such prestigious weather.

Are you scared?
Well, now that there are "tornadoes" hurtling towards me, yes I am quite afraid! We're on our way to the Dark Ages so I shut my eyes in fear! The mere thought my raincoat will not protect me is frightening.


Do you  anywhere specific that you have heard of ?
When I open my eyes I see the most beautiful place on earth. "showers moistened Eden" and I sat in the light rain this concluded the journey. It's the end of time! I feel the need to locate the 'Forbidden Fruit' or dance in the rain.

So what now?How do you feel?
That's a good question. Now I am one of the first to witness the "unseen clouds" of an  "unpeopled world". It's so quiet. I feel almost whimsical, I feel a sense of relaxation that I have never experienced. Its so quiet that I can hear my thoughts. I lie and stare at the "passing of enormous faces and animal shapes".

Destination: Stanza 8.0

Workshop by Billy Collins



A while ago, we had the opportunity to go on a journey through poetry. Seems weird huh! But it was actually quite enjoyable and personally it helped animate what on many days are just simple words that fill the lines.

Here is a link to the poem: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176048

1.       After reading the title, where do you think we are going? What sort of trip do you think this will be? Does it sound fun?

 

Workshop. Thinking of this I imagine so many workshops we could be going to. Is it a business workshop with stuffy people in suits or perhaps an artist’s workshop full of ingenious lunatics? Is it a workshop where I’ll be so engrossed in building my state-of-the-art sculpture or will I most likely fall asleep by the fourteenth ‘inspirational’ (note the sarcasm) speaker? One thing I know, I’ll be doing some work – I don’t know if that sounds fun.

 

2.       After reading the first stanza, where do we seem to be going? What sights do we see?  

 

This is an Ancient Mariner.

Hey I was right! “I’m in a workshop now”, but I still don’t know what kind! And for some reason there is an “ancient mariner grabbing me by the sleeve”. Last time I googled what an ancient mariner was, it wasn’t that pretty. Am not sure if it’s the same one mentioned in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, but if it is, this workshop must be a very old and quite spooky place.

 

 

3.       Where will we go next?

 

I can now totally relate

Remember how Gulliver (Gulliver’s Travel) felt when he became small and had to walk around large forests of trimmed grass? That’s how I feel! We are going through a poem, through the “first couple of stanzas” and up to the “last stanza” which is “my favorite”. But then again when I hear “the voice which sounds…very casual”, it’s almost as if I am listening to an English Professor (the really experienced type) deeply analyze a poem. Perhaps the voice belongs to a tour guide giving us a historical lecture of this poem.

 

 

4.       Do we need special clothes? What kind? Are they comfortable?

 

Very sad moment.
 I hope we aren't gate crashing

Tourist clothes! Definitely! You know those comfortable pants that are long but still not long enough to sweep the floors? Originally, I thought shorts would be much more appropriate, but after discovering that we would be going through “an obbligato of snow”, I wouldn’t recommend wearing shorts. Before I forget, at some point we do seem to visit a "kind of indoor cemetery...something about death...going on" so maybe we should carry some funeral appropriate clothes - a black dress will do.

 

5.       Whom do we meet along the way or who goes with us?

 

From the first stanza to the third one, it’s quite a lonely journey as we do not meet anyone. But then towards the end of the third stanza a “drawbridge operator just appears out of the blue” and then when we go to the “big aerodrome” we make friends with a “speaker…inspecting a row of dirigibles” who takes “us into his garden”.

 

6.       Do we meet animals? What are they doing? Are we happy or afraid?

There is this one mouse that we meet a lot. It started with hearing “the voice of the mouse” who was “describing where he lives”. He’s quite friendly and chatty – quite a contrast to the “drawbridge operator” who wouldn’t say a word and was just “jigging…his fishing pole” (though “I like jigging).

 

 

7.     What places do we go to? Are they fun places? What things do we do or see on our journey?

 

The Aerodrome

If there was one word to describe this journey, it would be amazingly adventurous! I mean where else would you hear someone say they can “almost taste the tail of the snake in its own mouth, if you know what I mean?” (no I don’t know what you mean!)  But as if that’s not enough, the next corner I come across has “pipe smoke blowing in my face”. At this point I give up on hygiene and conclude that after an “evening” roaming the “decaffeinated streets…I’m lost.” I did contemplate getting help, but before I got the Popo on speed dial, I am suddenly in a “big aerodrome”! If this is “a dream” then it’s a pretty awesome one I must say. The inspector guy is quite friendly – he took us over “into his garden”.

 

 

8.      Where have we arrived at the end?

 

It’s very relaxed now and the place gives me a “very strong feeling”. We’ve met this welcoming mouse who seems a lot of pride in his humble abode. “I love the details he uses when he’s describing where he lives”. “I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be” but I quite like it here, you know what I mean? (See what I did there).

The End.



 

 Thanks for joining on this journey

Hope M

 

 

  Nostalgia- Billy Collins

Its a trip, back to the past! "Remember the 1340s?" i thought to myself as i re-lived the memory, i kept saying"Where has the summer of 1572 gone?"  as the next period of time hazily passed before my eyes or sadly "The 1790s will never come again" but i could not help thinking that"I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821."
 ...each stanza is a different point in time... 

  

Oh goodness, we could be anywhere in the world! All i can leave you with are clues

  "We were doing a dance called the Catapult. Oh how the special those crazy clothes were! "You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade, and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular, the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework." They are too fun to worry about comfort ha ha!

Next we all go to a disco perhaps we'd be "Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle"

However just looking out the window i can see "the color craze of the decade." 

Of course, i saw such beauty "Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.

I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees

and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light

flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse

and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks." 

Over here there are lots of words we don't know, in fact we don't really need to write them down! We just "borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.

                              These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code."

We didn't really meet anybody knew, we did see some body's sister though she was always busy after that as she "...practiced the Daphne in her room."

"Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,

and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.” we like the people there, they are...  Eccentric.

plus, i like that ,"Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today."

After that "I was even thinking a little about the future, that place

where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,

a dance whose name we can only guess."

                WALKING ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

        I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach

        before stepping onto the first wave.

        Soon I am walking across the Atlantic

        thinking about Spain,

        checking for whales, waterspouts.

        I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.

        Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

        But for now I try to imagine what

        this must look like to the fish below,

        the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.

After reading the first stanza where do we seem to be going?

I think its a getaway sort of trip, "I wait for the holiday crowd to clear the beach

           before stepping onto the first wave." We don't know where we are going but I picture the                                                        beautiful sea. Oh! Shot, I forgot my camera.

                                                           

                                                           Where will we go next?

Not sure "thinking about Spain"  but for now we are still walking across the Atlantic. I am tired for its      a long journey, Spain sounds exciting though. I am looking forward to seeing the royal palace of                                   Madrid, the soccer matches and the religion how interesting!

                                    After reading the title where do you think we are going? 

  I imagine a place in Europe surrounded with water. "Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface." I                       feel like a baby being rocked to sleep safely. I hope the sharks don't eat me!

                                    Whom do we meet on our way or who goes with us?

The fish! The speaker seems to be having fun walking on water. (How cool is that?) Although he tries        to understand how,"this must look like to the fish below, the bottoms of my feet appearing,                                              disappearing." I hope I am not disturbing them yikes! 

                                                          What sights do we see?

         We can longer see the beach, land or people. We can see water and "checking for whales,        waterspouts." I feel alone for I have isolated myself which is scary considering I am walking alone.