Poetry Daily Blog Posting

"Memorising 'The Sun Rising' by John Donne" by Billy Collins

http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14954

After a good bit of reading, I chose Billy Collins’ “Memorizing ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne”. At first the title attracted me; I was interested in the idea of writing a poem about memorizing another. After having read it, the poem became even more appealing because of the way that Collins interlocks the speaker’s process of memorization with Donne’s original poem. Finally, the figurative language that is used throughout the poem to describe the process of memorization completes the beauty of the picture and unites the process of memorization with the original poem itself.

The intertwining of the speaker’s memorization of John Donne’s poem and of the contents of the poem itself give that sense remembrance that one has when the lines of a poem are twirling in one’s mind, thus in fact simulating memorization or active reading of poetry. Collins starts with the general statement that “every reader loves the way he tells off / the sun”. This first line has a double function: it firstly introduces Donne’s poem and it secondly introduces the speaker’s reaction to that same poem which will continue throughout the next eight stanzas. This interaction that the speaker has with “The Sun Rising” is best captured in the last line of the first stanza where he surmises that perhaps that day was “likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning”. This response is exactly what usually happens (to me at least) when one reads a poem; one starts thinking of the circumstances in which it was written, of what could possibly be added and so on and so forth. Thus, by capturing this response, Collins gives a sense of realism to the action of memorization that he is attempting to portray. The poem then transitions to the actual action of committing a poem to memory with “pacing the carpet and repeating the words” and then returns to Donne’s work in the second line of the third stanza. This continuing alternation once again recreates the sensation of memorization where one is constantly both in the poem and in the process of learning it.

Collins uses a great deal of metaphors to lend further detail to that action of memorization that the poem centers around. In the second stanza, the “syllables lock into rows” very much like soldiers in a line. This parallel clearly conveys the feeling of the rhyme that one gains as one memorizes more and more verses of a poem. In the third stanza, the first stanza is compared to “sky written letters on a windy day” to emphasize its fleeting quality when it is not yet entirely captured by memory. Collins continues this usage of metaphor throughout the poem until the very last stanza and in every case it serves to emphasize the qualities that he ascribes to the memorized poem.

In addition to the techniques that Billy Collins utilizes throughout the poem, I simply like the accuracy with which he describes the way he “works” with the poem. He attempts to memorize it stanza by stanza but with every new one an old one disappears, and so he takes it outside and then after “hours stepping up and down the poem” he is truly able to commit it to memory. Together with the process of memorization, there is also the constant remembrance of parts of the poem. It is as if the speaker remembers the meaning and perhaps some lines or words but cannot pull them all together until he truly immerses himself within the lines.