We have a lot going on this week at the Brown Deer Public Library (we just opened up our *BRAND NEW* library to the public, and we’re putting the finishing touches on our Summer Programming!), so this week’s ‘Poem of the Week’ is going to be a bit shorter than normal, at least analysis and background-wise.
Accordingly, I dug out a poem by a poet we’ve already featured in this space—Billy Collins. For more info on him and his background from an earlier ‘Poem of the Week’ feature, head over to this link.
For the poem this week, I’m choosing one of the first poems I read by him, and one that hooked me instantly: ‘The Afterlife.’
‘The Afterlife,’ first published in Poetry in the August 1990 issue and then later included in his collection Questions About Angels, is one of Collins’ most popular and accessible poems. It displays his trademark poetic style—simple, easy prose, without too many fluff words or hidden techniques on the surface—while also providing many homages, references, and unique imagery in each stanza. Read the poem—with a little bit of analysis—below.
Poem: ‘The Afterlife’
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth, or riffling through a magazine in bed, the dead of the day are setting out on their journey. They’re moving off in all imaginable directions, each according to his own private belief, and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal: that everyone is right, as it turns out. You go to the place you always thought you would go, The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head. Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors into a zone of light, white as a January sun. Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other. Some have already joined the celestial choir and are singing as if they have been doing this forever, while the less inventive find themselves stuck in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls. Some are approaching the apartment of the female God, a woman in her forties with short wiry hair and glasses hanging from her neck by a string. With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door. There are those who are squeezing into the bodies of animals–eagles and leopards–and one trying on the skin of a monkey like a tight suit, ready to begin another life in a more simple key, while others float off into some benign vagueness, little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere. There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves. He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog. The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins wishing they could return so they could learn Italian or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain. They wish they could wake in the morning like you and stand at a window examining the winter trees, every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
Analysis:
There are a few major ideas/observations that I would like to share quickly about this poem, and I think they are important in order to understand the entire message that Collins is trying to expound upon readers with this poem.
The overall idea of the poem is quite simple—Collins is saying that we have no true idea about what the afterlife really consists of—if there even is one—and he emphasizes this point by talking about all the different kinds of afterlives that could exist. He says that all of them are correct, with each individual person choosing what kind of afterlife they will dwell in for the rest of their days, and that no one human being can truly know what waits for us after we pass from this earthly life. For all we know, there is no afterlife, and to get angry about someone else’s concept of the afterlife, or to tell them that they’re wrong, is wrong in and of itself, and Collins is preaching a message of acceptance and tolerance here—the idea of the afterlife is just like any other human idea, a concept more than anything, and to brush off what one person thinks about what awaits us when we die is intolerant in the worst way.
At the same time, Collins mentions many different kinds of afterlife ideas/places/concepts, including both physical places and those of theory (Heaven, a physical room, the idea of reincarnation, etc.), and, while he’s emphasizing acceptance of everyone’s conception of an afterlife, he is also subtly poking fun at the human imagination and our fear of the unknown. One could argue that there simply is no greater fear to a human being than that of the unknown—think about the times you’ve been the most terrified in your life, and what caused you to feel that way. Think about the kinds of everyday things that make you the most nervous—interviewing for a new job; watching a child’s elementary school choir performance; performing a solo in church; buying a new house and fretting about whether your offer will be accepted or not. Nervousness and fear often go hand in hand and can even be confused for each other at times, and it is this fear of the unknown that Collins is subtly poking fun at with this poem. By listing all the different kinds of afterlives that humans have invented throughout the course of recorded history, he’s also showing that, while some of them seem absurd, they were once considered the norm, and it’s ridiculous to think that, today, what was once considered accepted thought could be absurdist, and it’s a warning for the future as well. Each successive generation will look back on the events and beliefs of the past through the lens of their present time period, and we have no idea what future generations will think of our ideas of the afterlife.
Finally, this poem is one of Collins’ most popular poems simply because it is so good in terms of imagery. Read each stanza—you have a clear picture in your head of every scene or idea that Collins writes about, and it works because he’s masterful with words. Like a painter using paint and oil to create images for our eyes, Collins is able to craft stanzas with just the right words in such a way that you could argue he’s ‘painting with words.’ Collins’ imagery is one of the reasons why he is such an accessible and popular poet, and the poem also succeeds because of its magnificent simplicity—you don’t have to dig to find the meaning, or look up words in the dictionary, or struggle to understand some vague poetic concept that he’s using. The poem is full of imagery that is exactly what it speaks of, with no hidden objects stuck between the lines of each stanza, and it’s a poem of both hope and finalities, the idea of an afterlife both comforting and like the end of a long journey.
For further reading:
Click here to place a hold on the collection where ‘The Afterlife’ is included, called Questions About Angels, or click here to purchase a copy of the collection from a local bookstore.
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