Litany

Billy CollinsFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2002

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Artificiality of Metaphorical Language

Classic love poems in the blazon tradition rely on hyperbolic comparison to praise the beloved, providing a list of superlative attributes modified by similes or metaphors that stress the unreal perfection of the poem’s subject. Like blazon’s parodic opposite, counterblazon, Collins’s poem uses metaphors to create distance between subject and comparison, highlighting the ways in which metaphor fails to properly capture the beloved, putting them on a pedestal rather than exploring intimate connection.

Many of the poem’s metaphors use traditional nature imagery, referencing for instance, “the dew on the morning grass” (Line 3), “marsh birds suddenly in flight” (Line 6), or “the field of cornflowers at dusk” (Line 15). These poetic visuals provide only surface emotion, however. A reader would have no way of identifying the speaker’s beloved based on this kind of description. Instead, Collins offers two other sources of deeper connection: either metaphors based on specific personal references, such as the declaration that the beloved is “the pigeon on the general’s head” (Line 13) while the speaker is “the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table” (Line 24), or the invitation to share humor and experience, illustrated in the slightly varied repetition of phrase “the bread and the knife” in the last stanza, which traces the formation of an inside joke.

Relationship Equality

One of the ways “Litany” rebels against the strictures of classic love poetry is by not focusing only on the speaker’s beloved, creating an unbalanced power dynamic in which the beloved is a decorative object without agency. Instead, the speaker invites the beloved to participate in the poem’s parodic use of metaphors and then even turns the focus of those metaphors to the speaker themself, building intimacy and equality between speaker and beloved.

In the fourth stanza, after the speaker has almost haphazardly determined that the beloved is like some things and not like others, the speaker offers the beloved the chance to confirm these judgments with “A quick look in the mirror” (Line 16). Rather than standing on a pedestal like the general on which the mischievous pigeon from Line 13 perches, the beloved here gets to participate in the poem’s fun, seeing firsthand a resemblance “neither the boots in the corner / nor the boat asleep in its boathouse” (Lines 17-18).

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In Stanza 5, the speaker focuses on the arbitrariness of these kinds of descriptions, which pluck at random from “the plentiful imagery of the world” (Line 20). If this is the case, there is no reason the poem shouldn’t apply the same kind of scattershot description to the speaker, who here paints themself as “the sound of rain on the roof,” “the moon in the trees,” “the blind woman's tea cup” (Lines 21, 25, 26). This becomes one of the poem’s funniest passages.

In breaking poetic tradition’s implicit power dynamic between poet-speaker-observer and beloved-object, Collins rejects artificial constructs to depict a healthier, more genuine love. The speaker acknowledges that their beloved is not a prize to be won, but one half of a whole. Each of them has something to offer the relationship. The poem ends with an invitation to share the memory of a bad metaphor by transforming it into an intimate inside joke: “don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife. / You are still the bread and the knife. / You will always be the bread and the knife” (Lines 27-29). Collins depicts a relationship between two people that the reader may recognize from their own life, and which serves as a healthier ideal to aspire to than the flowery and shallow loves so often seen in classic literature.

Humor Expressing Authenticity

“Litany” is a direct satire of the hyperbolic declarations of love poetry, especially the tradition of the blazon, in which a poet described a beloved with grand, abstract metaphors. Unlike those poems, which often feel like wheedling courtship trying to smooth talk a romantic interest, Collins’s poem creates authenticity by having its speaker address a love that has been comfortably in place for a long time.

The poem’s humor builds slowly. The first stanza piles increasingly clichéd and nonsensical metaphors onto each other, but the parody is subtle—the comparisons make the beloved into diametrically opposed objects like dew and the heat of the sun, copying the confusing metaphors of Collins’s epigram. Then, the poem humor becomes broader: Stanza 2 features the line, “There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air” (Line 11), which uses modern syntax to undercut the florid excesses of love poetry. Here is the moment the reader understands that this will not be that kind of poem. Instead, the speaker approaches their love with tongue-in-cheek honesty, which is more valuable than the empty platitudes of classic love poetry.

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The poem next offers humorous comparisons for the beloved and for the speaker, a distinct and amusing shift away from other poems of this tradition. These metaphors are neither flattering nor mean-spirited. Instead, the speaker builds a shared world of humor with the beloved, full of inside jokes and references.