Sam Reads Poetry

Days

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday's saucer
without the slightest clink.

Billy Collins

Why I like it:

Waking up, the feeling of waking up, has got to be one of the most universal human experiences. The freshness of it. Especially on those days (often summer ones for me, or near Christmas), when I have few things to worry about and my thoughts don’t drown out the lighter experiences of coming back into my body and into the room.

Collins flits from one of these experiences to the next in this poem. First, the “waking hand” – and there’s always been something, for me at least, about noticing my hands when I wake up. They seem to have little sleeps of their own, and wake up a moment after I do. I notice whether they’re nestled up under my chin, or if there’s one lying flat on its back next to the pillow, in front of my face. So I love the idea that the new day begins in that hand. It seems to fit.

And throughout the poem, there are towers, or things stacked on other things. The day (a small thing, we’re led to feel) is placed in your hand or on your forehead. There’s the thick masonry of ice. Ice built on ice. And turrets of clouds. Then the central metaphor, an impossible tower of dishes, and you, up on a ladder. In the world of this poem, everything is balancing on something else, and we’re led to feel the precariousness of something that we take for granted as being unshakably solid: another day, as real as anything, and the immutable trail of days behind us.

I probably love this poem mostly for that. Because it makes me feel delicate and grateful, simultaneously. It’s quite a flattering poem, in my mind. I’d love to be the “you” in this poem, whispering and holding my breath to stack one day on the others. Really I’m more one to throw the covers off forcefully, knowing that it’ll take a lurch to get me out of bed and shake the sleep off me. And Collins brushes off this compliment so easily, with a “no wonder.”

I also love the brightness of this poem; the brightness of a palm, of the ice, the snow, the clouds, and, I like to think, the cup and saucer. They form a dream-like constellation of light, the way we sometimes understand the connection of things when we’re half asleep better than we do when we’re awake. The central metaphor of an entertainer stacking dishes has that character too, of a connection made half in sleep. You could probably make the case that poetry itself is language that comes partly from the conscious, partly from the subconscious mind.

Finally, there’s this beautiful mixed metaphor. The day is a gift, something placed in your hand, but also a cup that you place on yesterday’s saucer. Isn’t that just it? You wake up, and that’s a gift, but as for keeping this thing together, that’s all you.

A note on form:

This poem’s form teeters just off balance where the imagery also becomes most precarious. Notice how the first two quatrains are one sentence each, ending with an end-stopped line. Then, when we meet the image of “this day […] resting somehow / on the one before it”, and the enjambed line mimics the subject matter. “Resting somehow” dangles at the end of the stanza, which we expect to be end-stopped. The stanza, with the day it describes, is leaning. We’re caught in the next line, which is end-stopped with a comma, giving us a moment to recover our balance.

There is also a great deal of attention payed to the sound these words make. Notice in the last stanza how soft the consonants are with the exception of the sharp “k” sound of cup and clink. There’s a lot of “th” and “s” otherwise. The sound that “cup” and “clink” make is the only sharp thing in this stanza, lending a precarious and delicate sound, like porcelain, to this final image.

The rhyme is fairly subtle, but present in this poem. Notice the assonance and occasional exact rhymes on the “oh/ow” and “eye” sounds:

Days

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.   

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday's saucer
without the slightest clink.

Billy Collins

Also notice how these two dominant sounds dwindle as the poem goes on. That feeling of phonetic regularity slowly disappears as the poem stacks line on line.

It’s also striking how the poem moves from being primarily visual in its sensory imagery to a few lines that step into the realm of sound. This is a trick Collins likes, and one he probably learned from the Japanese poets:

A lightning flash-
the sound of water drops
falling through bamboo

Taniguchi Buson, tr. R.H. Blyth

By shifting to an unexpected sensory input, a poem takes on an unexpected dimension of reality. Something about that unexpectedly heightened reality makes everything in the poem feel more real. In Buson’s poem above, I would say that the sudden shift from visual to sound brings the feeling of rain, including the touch of it, much closer to the reader. In Collins’ poem, we hear the sound of a day being stacked delicately on another, and it sounds, astonishingly, like nothing.