Sinyard 1

Shauna Sinyard

Mark Hall, Ph.D.

Assignment 2

1 March 2011

Angels and War: Analyzing Billy Collins

Billy Collins’ poetry plants a seed of understanding into the minds of those who read it.

His use of powerful imagery and witty irony forces the reader to think past the surface level and

indulge in a world of deeper comprehension. His conversational tone allows the reader to move

past the stanzas and interpret the true messages of his poetry.

In “Building with Its Face Blown Off,” Collins personifies an apartment that has been

bombed out and exposed to the world. He compares the “blue and white striped wallpaper of a

second story bedroom” to “wearing only its striped pajamas,” making the readers feel as if the

apartment had lost its inherent right to privacy. He also alludes to the bathroom feeling

“embarrassed” at its nakedness and untidiness caused by the explosion. This powerful imagery,

of the destroyed apartment paired with its personification showcases the fragility of countries

plagued by war. It allows us to feel sorry for the building, more so even than feeling sorry for

the inhabitants of the apartment; the building is vulnerable, exposed, and raw. In an interview

with Michael Meyer, Collins speaks about the inspiration for the poem, saying that although the

poem has a blatantly political undertone, he usually shies away from that kind of writing. He

says that “before poetry can be political, it must be personal” and that the actual inspiration for

the poem was a picture in a newspaper of a bombed out house in Baghdad.

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In the next stanza, the speaker compares the blown out apartment to a stage, with “no

characters, no dialogue, no beginning, middle and end.” There are two vital components of

theater. First and foremost, theater must be live. In this sense, Collins is correct in comparing

the bombed-out apartment to a stage. What is more live than real life? The second component

of theater is that there must be an audience, which according to the poem “neighbors and soldiers

poke around in the rubble below.” However, without a play to perform, without the performers

or the dialogue, this building is merely a reminder of the fragility of life to those who see it. It

makes a statement that an entire play could not. In the last two stanzas of the poem, Collins

sends a powerful message about ignorance and indifference. The stark contrast between the

lovely couple having a picnic, complete with wine, bread, cheese and olives and the raw,

exposed building creates a tension for the reader. Here, irony plays a part in eliciting a powerful

response in the reader, a disdain for those who are privileged enough to live in a country that

doesn’t have daily bombings that destroy entire apartment buildings.

In the first stanza of “Questions about Angels,” Billy Collins muses on the mocking

question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” This phrase was used to mock

medieval angelology and those who studied it, namely Thomas Aquinas. Contemporarily, the

phrase serves a metaphor for wasting time debating topics of no practical value. In this poem,

the speaker plays a game with the reader; he challenges us to ask the deeper questions about life,

masked by the metaphor of angels. These questions are masked by the imagery and metaphor of

an angel’s daily life. “Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing? Do they swing

like children from the hinges of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards…
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What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes, their diet of unfiltered divine light?”

The speaker asks the questions that he feels are not traditionally asked. The speaker of the poem

implies that their train of thought transcends that of the medieval theologians. In this next

stanza, the speaker asks “If an angel delivered the mail/would he arrive in a blinding rush of

wings or would he just assume/ the appearance of the regular mailman and/ whistle up the

driveway reading the postcards?” In this stanza, the speaker is speaking for the everyday angels

of the world, the people who are not ethereal and holy spirits, but those who are just regular men

and women, spreading angelic thoughts to the world.

The phrase “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” implies that there are

billions of angels, all of which can fit in the tiniest bit of space. The speaker of this poem does

not like the implication of an infinite amount of angels and uses one simple conjunction to

change the thought process of the reader: but. Instead of millions, billions, or an infinite amount

of angels, the speaker suggests there is only one: “one female angel dancing alone in her

stocking feet, a small jazz combo working in the background.” Here, the musician, who has

been playing for the angel forever, is getting tired and restless of entertaining the angel, who has

been dancing eternally.

In both of these poems, Billy Collins uses an informal kind of diction. He takes on a

conversational tone that invites the reader to make a connection with the speaker of the poem.

The poetry is relatable and informal. Collins uses sarcasm and satire to highlight or poke fun at

certain things he finds to be unfair. In “Building with Its Face Blown Off,” Collins uses the

couple at the end of the poem as an allegory to the indifference that people have towards wars in
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other countries. He forces the reader to feel anger or even personal guilt or remorse for not being

more involved with the ways of the world. In “Questions about Angels,” Collins shows a bit of

his own personal arrogance. He seems to think of himself as a much deeper thinker than the

average person, and that shows with the playful game he plays with the reader. He challenges the

reader to transcend traditional thought. Collins uses symbols and metaphors to create a specific

kind of imagery in the mind of the reader. In “Building with Its Face Blown Off,” Collins uses

the first six stanzas to delicately weave in your mind’s eye the personified building caught in the

middle of a war.

I know there is more for me to say here. I want to relate the two poems together more, and

highlight more of the elements of poetry. I feel like I mostly summarized the poems, which

wasn’t my intention.

This is definitely a ROUGH draft.

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Works Cited

"How many angels can stand (dance) on the head of a pin?" The American Heritage® New

Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. 28

Feb. 2011. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/how many angels

can stand (dance) on the head of a pin?>.

Meyer, Michael. "A Study of Billy Collins: The Author Reflects on Five Poems." The Bedford

Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, and Writing. Boston: Bedford of St.

Martin's, 2011. Print.