Creative style is used to make a sensible flow
throughout a piece of writing. There are so many different rhetorical devices
that can be used to do this in an effective way. The First Night by
Billy Collins uses multiple of these devices to link together his thoughts. The
poem makes an attempt at trying to understand death. Dying is such a dark and twisted
topic to dive deeper into through this interesting portal. Collins goes down a
path of wonderment trying to find answers to many questions. What is death?
What happens after death? Who is most impacted by death? The poem opens up all
of these questions and leaves them open to interpretation by the reader. The
poem ends by telling readers everywhere to enjoy life while it lasts.
According to
poetryfoundation.org, Billy Collins is known for his witty poems that bring
about new conversations on topics. Collins tries to understand ideas from different
angles and find new ways of thinking and coping. He uses this analysis style in
his poetry to keep his readers engaged and thinking throughout his works.
Collins tries to write his poems to the person that he imagines he is talking
to in the room. He is very careful in the beginning of the poem to try and establish
a friendly relationship with the reader. This text
is written to involve the writer and reader. The writer is looking to motivate
the reader to become consumed with thoughts about death, dying, and those that
the reader has lost. From that point, he attempts to create a logical path of thinking
from a simple idea of the dead to understanding that the living should be happy
with what they have been given in life.
The poem begins with
a quote by Juan Ramón Jiménez, another poet. “The worst thing about death must
be the first night.” Jiménez sets the tone for the poem with the first question
being asked. Jiménez wrote this quotation in a poem that he published while
struggling with his father many years after the lost. The author lost his
father at the age of eighteen and was left to fend for himself. The pain of
this loss was with him throughout his life, but it subsided some in later
years. Now we ask, is it the worst night for the deceased or the loved ones
left behind? With this question already in mind, the audience is thinking about
death and the experiences they have had with it, as they entered into the poem.
Collins uses his
classic writing style in this poem like many others to come before and after
it. With the help of many devices, he creates a good flow for his reader to
follow. Rhetorical devices can be effective when used in a proper way. When
looking at a creative style piece of writing, it can be called effective if all
of the points are made clear and understandable. Ideas are made clear with a
good flow that connects all of the parts together. Some of the devices used are
analogy, personification, allusion, and exemplum.
The analogy in the
poem is comparing life to death. The title starts this analogy: three words
that can mean two things. Is Collins trying to speak on the first night of life
or death? Another analogy in the poem dealing with the stages of life is using
the word “death” as if it was its own person or being: “will the dead gather to watch them rise and set”.
This is also an example of personification. Do
the dead really watch the sun? Do the have day and night? Personification is
giving human like qualities to objects that are not humans. This raises the
question of are the dead still humans? There are an extraordinary number of
questions that are raised from reading this poem.
An allusion is a
passive, indirect reference to something in order to bring it to a reader’s
mind without explicitly mentioning the thing: such as hell. Collins writes, “then repair, each soul alone, to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.”
This excerpt is taken from a stanza evaluating the first night of death for the
deceased. Collins is stating his opinion that on the first night of death that
the deceased all spend this night in hell; however, this is not said directly
stated. This could be for many reasons. Collins may want to leave it open to
different interpretations. For example the stanza could be saying that the
first night is like hell in the sense that the deceased is miserable since he
had to leave his loved ones.
The last of the
rhetorical devices used by Collins is exemplum. Simplistically, exemplum is an
example. The example made in The First
Night is that the living will never be able to understand about death.
Collins has a continuous obstacle with understanding death and the unknown of
it. Like everyone else who has ever lived, he wants to understand after we go
six feet under the ground. Collins writes, “how can I describe a
sun that will shine after death?” Something as simply
as the sun raises several questions about what is to come with the inevitable.
Will there still be sun, light, warmth after death? Exemplum is correctly used
to get the reader to examine the differences between life and death.
This poem by Billy Collins uses rhetorical devices in the creative
style well. Collins uses many rhetorical devices that establish a movement
through the lines to help create unconscious thoughts for the reader. In the
beginning of the poem it is not in the readers’ mind to think about what
happens after death, but by the end of the poem, Collins has everyone grateful
for the things that we get to enjoy while we are alive. The creative style does
this by passively moving from one thought to the next and having them connect
in a way that a reader doesn’t notice a change in ideas from stanza to stanza.
This is a poem that will forever keeping people thinking and questioning death.
E. West
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