Title: Critical Essay on "The Afterlife"
Source: Poetry for Students. Ed. David A. Galens. Vol. 18. Detroit: Gale, 2003. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
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Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale
Billy Collins threatens to become the first genuinely popular American poet since Robert Frost and Rod McKuen. Unlike Frost, though, Collins suffers from a decades-long decline in publications that print poetry. Long past are the days when newspapers would regularly print verse and during which educated Americans were exposed to poetry in a variety of general magazines. But, unlike McKuen, whose works gained a great deal of popularity in the late 1960s, Collins is able to be accessible without being maudlin and banal. Collins's success, though, has bred its own species of critic such as Jeredith Merrin, who lambastes Collins's user-friendliness and lack of emotional depth. Writing in The Southern Review, Merrin asserts that Collins "is a writer who takes you for a walk on the mild side." On the other hand, Collins has retained an audience of perceptive and appreciative readers. Writing in the prestigious journal Poetry, the reviewer John Taylor has said, "Ultimately, a funny-sad ambience characterizes his best work. His soft metaphysical touch seemingly derives from an acute awareness of man's irreparable separation from both material reality and any conceivable spiritual horizon." Collins is both accessible and accomplished; if he does not in the end plumb the depths of consciousness and the mystery of existence, he does write in an admirably engaging and entertaining style. "The Afterlife" is a poem with many postmodern sensibilities: allusive, ironic, self-reflexive, and humorous, it clearly illustrates the assets and liabilities of the poet's style. If one has no hope of eternal reward and no fear of damnation, regret and whimsical musing are fitting and proper attitudes.
Like many contemporary poets, Collins writes in free but not unstructured verse. His lines tend to contain five important stressed syllables, with a number of unstressed syllables falling in a natural, unmetered pattern. This rhythmic pattern is most likely a result of the poet's sense of line and rhythm rather than any conscious decision. It resembles Gerard Manley Hopkins's "sprung rhythm," which counts only the important syllables, but it is considerably looser. Merrin calls it "approximate pentameter." Occasionally, Collins will dispense with the five-beat line when it suits his purpose, as in the line "and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal." In his line and stanza structure, Collins implicitly respects form but clearly does not regard it as something to distract from the other aspects of his poetry, such as humor, surprise, and allusion. Indeed, it takes some work to see that Collins uses any rhythmic structure at all. The beat of the poem, such as it is, does its work upon the reader subliminally, beneath the conscious appreciation for meter that one sees in the poems of Robert Frost or other formalists.One of the keys to understanding this poem is to recognize how the poet combines the mundane with the mysterious. Death is perhaps the most puzzling and inscrutable mystery that faces humans. It is the grounds of anxiety, the stuff of tragedy, and the source of sadness, poignancy, and passion. Most Americans, when polled, will say they believe in an afterlife, and doubtless many of those who cannot bring themselves to such a belief have meditated on what survives of an individual after one has, in Shakespeare's words, "shuffled off this mortal coil." Essentially, there are two approaches to death, the tragic and the comic. Collins is a funny guy, and this poem is characterized by a bemused lightness of expression and a tolerant comic vision.
The opening lines of the poem juxtapose images of utter normality with a mysterious other-worldliness. The afterlife is seen as a nocturnal shadow-existence; the dead "of the day" start their journey each night, traveling away from the world of life and tooth-brushing and magazines. Collins does not have a single message to preach about the afterlife. A true relativist and postmodernist, Collins's single central insight, the secret that even Lazarus, the man raised from the dead by Christ, will not reveal, is that there is no one destination, that "everyone is right, as it turns out." If Paradise or Hell awaited everyone, regardless of their beliefs, then this would not be the light and humorous poem that Collins intends. Such a poem would challenge and frighten and imply moralistic judgment. The poet wants none of this; he couches his own poignancy over death in images that humorously reflect a variety of religious beliefs. Collins never quite states his own view on the afterlife, though he hints at it, at the end.
The first images of the afterlife are recognizable from contemporary religious traditions and popular culture. Some of the dead go into a white zone, a zone that hints at transcendence and a passage into another realm, but which remains reverently agnostic in being free of any details. Subsequent images depict the judgment of God in an almost cartoonish way, "with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other." The conventional image of the celestial choir is invoked here as well. For the shallow and hedonistic, the afterlife is just as they too would want it. The "less inventive" find themselves surrounded by the sensory pleasures of "food and chorus girls."
But none of this is funny, and Collins has set out to amuse his readers. A typical Collins poem often revels in humor and wit and irony on its way to some insight that is more substantial. After the conventional views of the afterlife, the poet regales readers with other images and ideas. Some of the dead approach the apartment of a female God who observes them through a hole in her door. This God is fully anthropomorphized as a middle-aged woman with "short wiry hair." Further, she has "glasses hung from her neck by a string." Nothing could be farther from the God of Infinite Justice and Retribution. "Quite so," one can imagine Collins saying. Many people want to be infinitely far from such a God.
Some people believe in reincarnation, and Collins represents this idea by speaking of people who are gearing up for a new life, "squeezing" into new bodies. Readers read about one soul "trying on / the skin of a monkey like a tight suit / ready to begin another life in a more simple key." Some are simply floating off into a sphere of "benign vagueness," reflecting the view that the afterlife has nothing specific to be said about it, that it is merely, as Collins says, "the ultimate elsewhere." It is all a matter of choice and individual belief, Collins seems to be saying at this point. Whatever one believes, that is what the afterlife is. Such a view is common among postmodern relativists. Such readers, and there are many of them, would find Collins's poem to be enlightened and nonjudgmental. Nevertheless, some of the dead seem to be sillier than the others. A few classicists descend into a pagan underworld, guarded by Cerberus and, in a touch of mocking humor, Edith Hamilton, the compiler of one of the standard works of classical mythology, which is still taught in high schools and colleges.
In their instructive book The Postmodern Turn, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner distinguish between modernist and postmodernist writers by saying, "Where modern artists were typically insular, obscure, and idiosyncratic in their work, postmodern artists began to speak in the most available, public, and commodified languages." One of the keys to Collins's accessibility is that he does not, like the high modernists Pound and Eliot, allude to obscure texts and sources, challenging the erudition of the reader and requiring footnotes for most students to follow. Instead, Collins generally limits his allusions to writers one can expect to encounter in good high school classes and undergraduate literature courses. As one might imagine, such a middlebrow approach alienates the erudite but gains a following among the general poetry audience. Collins's poems reach out, not just to the readers of small and specialized journals, but to a public that wants some thoughtfulness but not bombast and pretentiousness. Jason Gray, in a sympathetic review in Prairie Schooner, calls the work the "poetry of the moment's reflection, the sigh, the wish, the little hopes of life." Fully congruent with postmodernism's distrust for "meta-narrative," Collins turns his attention away from grandiose gestures and systems and toward the lived moments and reflective incidents of a playful but rather quiet life.
At the end of the poem Collins seems to reveal his own views of the afterlife and in which the humor turns poignant. Readers may infer that Collins himself does not believe in the sorts of afterlife he has depicted in his poem. He puts his own attitudes into the perspective of the great class of none-of-the-above. "The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins"; because these people have no particular views of the afterlife, they have no place to go. Earth is where they direct their thoughts. Or, in Merrin's acerbic estimation, "What you already know on earth, he assures you, is all you need to know." Since the dead have their own simple desires, they think about rather simple and modest activities such as learning Italian, visiting the pyramids, or playing golf. All these activities seem rather whimsical compared to grandiose concepts of the afterlife. But they are all things that humans do, some, at least, and that most are capable of doing. In this last stanza, Collins exhibits a mild regret that life is too short and there are many worthwhile things that will never be accomplished. At the end, Collins says, "They could wake in the morning like you." This "you" is simultaneously a direct address to the reader, and it is the poet speaking to himself about his own mortality and his own limited sovereignty in the kingdom of the living.
The dead, as Collins represents, wish they could stand examining the winter trees, with "every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow." Aside from the quiet evocativeness of the word "ghost," this ending alludes to the famous conclusion of James Joyce's short story "The Dead": "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." For Collins, contemplation of the afterlife is really a call to reflect on life and the living. If one has no hope of eternal reward and no fear of damnation, regret and whimsical musing are fitting and proper attitudes. Collins, in his own quiet, unpretentious, and somewhat postmodern way, brings his poem to conclusion in a meditative moment that transcends irony.
Source Citation
Pool, Frank. "Critical Essay on 'The Afterlife'." Poetry for Students. Ed. David A. Galens. Vol. 18. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 Jan. 2011.
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