SUBMITTED BY ELAINE MAGLIARO
In “Litany,” Billy Collins “steals” the first two lines of another writer’s poem…then creates his own poem.
Litany
By Billy Collins
You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine…
~ Jacques Crickillon
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
You can read the rest of the poem here.
NOTE: Below the fold, I have a link to a video of Billy Collins reading “Litany”–as well as a video of a three-year-old boy reciting the poem.
3-year-old recites poem, “Litany” by Billy Collins
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Flowers For Socrates 
He says: It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
To me, it sounds like a playful slam on poets just stringing together evocative imagery without any coherent binding. The imagery is not the message, just like stringing together some cool chords does not make a song. There needs to be some connective relationships in the imagery, or it is just a slide show of random pictures.
I’m not sure what Crickillon’s message is, unless she is feeling peckish. I think Collins message is “imagery is meaningless without an underlying message.”
Tony,
Here’s an excerpt from a New York Times review of Billy Collins’s book “Nine Horses”–which included his poem “Litany”:
You Are Not the Pine-Scented Air, O.K.?
By Mary Jo Salter
Published: October 20, 2002
Excerpt:
Among all the poems in ”Nine Horses,” the marvelous ”Litany” strikes me as the likeliest new candidate to inspire the question ”Do you know the Billy Collins poem about . . . ?” What sets ”Litany” apart is that the words themselves, not just the situation, are so memorable. That’s because it capitalizes on some of the oldest verbal conventions in poetry — parallelism, refrain, the lover’s mystical hyperbole — and simultaneously pokes fun at them. Quoting a snippet of a poem by the Belgian poet Jacques Crickillon (”You are the bread and the knife, / The crystal goblet and the wine”), Collins offers his lover a stanza of similarly lofty praises before asserting himself:
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is no way you are the pine-scented air.
And the poet isn’t finished: ”It might interest you to know . . . that I am the sound of rain on the roof.” It turns out he’s a lot of other things she may not have appreciated: ”I am also the moon in the trees / and the blind woman’s teacup.” He’s not so hardhearted, though, that he won’t throw her a bone at the end: ”But don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife. / You are still the bread and the knife.”
Comforted by that now familiar phrase as the poem closes, you also know you’ve had your mind freshened, robbed of a few complacencies. And that two-minute trajectory makes Billy Collins the pen and the ink, the keyboard and the screen . . . whatever you’d call the real thing in poetry.
Elaine: Hooray, I win the Internets!
“I have been the wind beneath their wings/ but not the firmament for others feet”
Am I the pigeon on the general’s head? Some might say. The moon in the trees? I have been known to moon.
Food for thought.
Great poem, Elaine. Thanks for sharing it.