Introduction to Poetry Analysis

In Billy Collins' poem "Introduction to Poetry", we are presented with many metaphors and symbols. The first part of the poem that is taken into account is the title, "Introduction to Poetry". Given this title we can infer that the poem is about the beginning of poetry and not knowing much about to topic. In the first stanza "I ask them to take a poem / and hold it up/ like a color slide", we can assume that the speaker is a poetry professor or teacher and that in saying "them", he is referring to his students. The speaker wants his students to see a poem in a different light.

"I say drop a mouse into a poem / and watch him probe his way out,", as given in the third stanza, the speaker uses a metaphor to compare his students to mice, they are clueless about what they are presented and they must take time to get into and explore the poem to understand it. "Or walk inside the poem's room / and fell the walls for a light switch." Another metaphor is used here to show how the students enter a poem knowing nothing about it as if it were a dark room, and they have to find its meaning , "the light switch", by gently searching it.

"I want them to waterski / across the surface of a poem / waving at the author's name on the shore." The speaker uses imagery here to show what the students have received from the poet and how they must move along deeper into the poem by themselves. "But all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with a rope / and torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means." The speaker is referring to how most over analyze poetry. Many times poetry is ripped into pieces to find a deeper meaning and its sheer beauty is taken away.

The tone of the poem is frustrated; the speaker is frustrated because the beauty and simplicity of poetry is damaged when trying to