Flames
By: Billy Collins Smokey the Bear heads into the autumn woods with a red can of gasoline and a box of wooden matches. His ranger's hat is cocked at a disturbing angle. His brown fur gleams under the high sun as his paws, the size of catcher's mitts, crackle into the distance. He is sick of dispensing warnings to the careless, the half-wit camper, the dumbbell hiker. He is going to show them how a professional does it. |
The Boy
By: Marilyn Hacker It is the boy in me who's looking out the window, while someone across the street mends a pillowcase, clouds shift, the gutter spout pours rain, someone else lights a cigarette? (Because he flinched, because he didn't whirl around, face them, because he didn't hurl the challenge back—"Fascists?"—not "Faggots"—Swine! he briefly wonders—if he were a girl . . .) He writes a line. He crosses out a line. I'll never be a man, but there's a boy crossing out words: the rain, the linen-mender, are all the homework he will do today. The absence and the priviledge of gender confound in him, soprano, clumsy, frail. Not neuter—neutral human, and unmarked, the younger brother in the fairy tale except, boys shouted "Jew!" across the park at him when he was coming home from school. The book that he just read, about the war, the partisans, is less a terrible and thrilling story, more a warning, more a code, and he must puzzle out the code. He has short hair, a red sweatshirt. They know something about him—that he should be proud of? That's shameful if it shows? That got you killed in 1942. In his story, do the partisans have sons? Have grandparents? Is he a Jew more than he is a boy, who'll be a man someday? Someone who'll never be a man looks out the window at the rain he thought might stop. He reads the sentence he began. He writes down something that he crosses out. |
AnalysisFlames:
This poem reflects Billy Collins' ability to write humorously. However, after more careful analysis, a person realizes that the poem possesses a practical meaning. Smokey the Bear, like many people who try to serve as examples and teachers, is irritated by the lack of respect people give his guidelines. He reaches his limit and decides to defy his own teachings just to illustrate the harmful effects the negative actions he tries to deter possess The Boy: Puberty is a chaotic time, full of powerful and new emotions, bodily changes, and self-reflection. "The Boy" describes someone in the midst of such changes, which include a budding awareness of the boy's sexuality and cultural identity. The boy, however, is also in someone else, who is similarly questioning her identity, testing the limits of her own self-reflection. The "twinning" of these two personas creates a challenging poem for readers, especially beginning poetry readers, to comprehend. One device that helps readers is the order of the poem—the regular meter and consistent rhyme scheme. The form of the poem helps shape and contain the whorl of changing pronouns, the movement between imagined selves, and offers readers a way to consider their own relationship to the outside world and to their own identities. |