My Essay

Suggestions for Tomorrow:

An essay on Billy Collins’s poem “The Afterlife”

By Jonathan Eyer

…and thank you to God

for making me an atheist.

~ Ricky Gervais

 (to a large crowd, after an awards ceremony)

Wow… there’s no switching teams after that.

~Observer

            At first glance, “The Afterlife,” a poem by Billy Collins, is enough to catch the attention of most merely from the gravity of the subject and the thoughts or feelings or questions it evokes. Especially for those who have split mankind by the two primary views possible on it: A. Those that believe in one, and B. The depressed. No. Only kidding. And, now that I appear biased, I’ll admit that my rational brain can’t quite make sense of the existence of a God. Lord knows, I want there to be one – a nice one, that is. I’ll pass on any of those layers that Dante was talking about, unless I missed one about nougat… but I don’t think I did. Also, between the choices of knowing there was no God and being miserable, or there being no God, yet I just skip my way through the day, blissfully unaware, with tap shoes and Amens and jazz hands… I’d have to choose the latter, I guess. I mean, who doesn’t want to be blissfully happy? Though, now that I think about it, I don’t know. I always had a problem with those people that only use the word blessed for anything positive, you know?

“How’s it goin’?”

“Oh, I’m blessed!”

“That’s a nice car.”

“Oh, I know! I’m blessed!”

“I think I see you pull out of that parking lot every day. I guess we take our lunch at the same time. You work across the street at corporate?”

“What can I say? I’m blessed!”

“I’ll bet the benefits are pretty good over there, huh?”

“Hey, I’m not goin’ to lie and say I’m not blessed!”

“Nope, nope… course not…”

“Oh my lord! This scratcher is a five dollar winner! You know I’m blessed!”

“Really? Seriously? God came down and made sure that was a five dollar winner… to bless you? Seriously? He just said ‘You know, I think I’m gonna let those Haitians sort out all of that earthquake stuff on their own for now, I’ve got a scratcher to rub a little magic on back in the states. And besides, one can only spend so much time in the Caribbean, you know? Ugh, this Humidity… I gotta go make sure some people are BLESSED! AMEN!’”

“Wow… you goin to hell... but not me, I’m ble-”

 “Let me guess, you’re blessed.”

“How’d you know that’s what I was gon- oh, lord, that just shows how blessed I am! You knew I was blessed before I even said Blessed! Oh! …Blessed!”

“Amen.”

Well, I realize now that I should’ve just mentioned something to the effect of how the blissfully happy can, at times, be a bit of an annoyance to the rest of us, but… damn this stream of consciousness. Anyway, now that I’ve rambled on to the point where I, myself, am a bit disoriented, let me just outright say it: The Title and subject of The Afterlife might incite a glance or inspection from anyone, regardless of personal belief, for that other possibility I haven’t mentioned… the chance that it does have some sort of answer we were searching for, whether or not we knew it. It’s just one of those topics. Well, let’s take a closer look, but first, let's take a look at the technical aspects of the work.

           

1.      The Technicalities

a.      The Poem

 The Afterlife

 While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,

or riffling through a magazine in bed,

the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They're moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals--eagles and leopards--and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

~ Billy Collins ~

  

b.      Technical Analysis

Many would be hard pressed to find any sort of structure in the average Collins poem and The Afterlife is no different. It’s really all a matter of Collins own personal feel for the flow of the poem. It’s like that old saying “yada, yada, blah, blah, something, something…” I don’t know, but I do remember that it boiled down to something of how you have to learn the rules before you can break them. Which was, no doubt, written by some academic who spent years learning the rules and wouldn’t have that abrogated by some punk with a gift if it was the last thing, but for the rest of us, I suppose it holds true. Collins, though, has certainly learned the rules and I’m not sure that he breaks them. I think, to him, they’ve become, more or less, suggestions or they’ve manifested as some conglomerate in his subconscious, some quiet voice in his mind’s periphery choosing a word here, a line break there, an ellipsis…            

            Billy writes in free verse, but eventually one begins to see glimpses of structure. He’s a big fan of narrowing the number of syllables in line-ending words, especially from the top of a stanza to the bottom. Trace your finger down the right side of the second stanza and observe:

directions,

 belief,
reveal:
out.
go,
head.

This narrowing serves to close the thought or message of the stanza, to give it a sense of permanency. Now, in rhyming terms, these line-ending words (out, go and head), consisting of one stressed syllable, would be referred to as masculine. (Whereas a feminine example could be found in the words never or easy: two-syllable words where a first, stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable.) However, we don’t really see a typical rhyme pattern here. In a Collins poem we usually have to look a little deeper for that sense of method or calculation or structure that we could feel but couldn’t point out initially. For example, no, we really don’t see the typical rhyme pattern in this poem, but we do see examples of internal rhyme, also called middle rhyme, as in the line:

you go to the place you always thought you would go

In this case, it seems the repetition of the same word reinforces, in form, a sense of repetition in the actual meaning of the line itself: we’ll go the place we repeatedly thought we’d go. Also, the bland rhyming of a word with itself suggests a sense of the mundane that seems to fit with the message of the line: No, not streets of gold and boundless praise, no landscape personalized with the unimaginable fantastic, or the warm catharsis of summer nights trimmed with willows and wine, fireflies and song, a fathomless blue sky… and her: the one that got away and, now, has gotten right back and can’t get enough… of you – nope, just that place you’ve already been to a million times.  

            Also, in the fourth stanza, we see an example of near rhyme (also called off rhyme, slant rhyme, imperfect rhyme or half rhyme):

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,

In the words choir and forever, we see a correspondence in sound that contributes to the correspondence in deed: they’re singing in the choir as though they’ve singing forever.  This near rhyme, with its celestial scenery, provides the perfect setting for the contrast of the following lines:

while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

The pang of dissonance in the word stuck, we naturally find off putting which lends to the impression we’re to have of these less inventive souls surrounded by chorus girls, while the alliteration in full of food (and chorus girls as well, if you ask me) lends a congruent simplicity to the spectacle of so many seeming simpletons.

            We also see a trend toward somewhat of a mutable pentameter. Many of the lines in the poem contain a total of five accented syllables, but as the placement of accent varies within the foot, we find ourselves unable to define the meter any further. I’m certainly no expert on the subject, but let me elaborate a bit. The foot is the smallest segment of rhythm in a poem and it’s defined by a pattern of syllables. Imagine the drum beat:

Bah-Bah-BUM

 This would be an example of an Anapestic foot: two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed. Now, if we repeat it, say four times…

Bah-Bah-BUM / Bah-Bah-BUM / Bah-Bah-BUM / Bah-Bah-BUM

We have a tetrameter: four feet per line. So, with a little bit of work, we’ve been able to define the above rhythm (the Bah-Bah-BUMs) as Anapestic Tetrameter. To be honest, up until recently, this was all Greek to me (which was a little easier to deal with after learning that anapest actually comes from the Greek, anápaistos, literally meaning, “struck back,” as it is the reverse of the dactylic foot) until I was able to put it into context by associating it with something familiar. Perhaps you’ll recognize the following verse, (I’ve underlined the unstressed syllables and emboldened the stressed):

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse

Twas the Night Before Christmas: a prime example of Anapestic Tetrameter. A quick examination of The Afterlife and you’ll see how the differing patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables within the feet of each line (and even feet within the line, at times, lines within the stanza) reveal why I call it a mutable pentameter.

            In the seventh stanza, however, we find that Collins breaks his norm to serve other purposes. For instance:

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

Here, I don’t think we’re meant to hear that one-syllable, brief clap of the stanza closing. The facts that these two lines compose the entire stanza, and that Collins also breaks, slightly, from the mutable pentameter seem to demand more attention as well. As those others float off into some benign vagueness, for the ultimate elsewhere, it seems that we’re to tarry a moment as an audience, feel the gravity of that benign vagueness, try to fathom that ultimate elsewhere, how to avoid it…

            It should be added that, within the final line:

every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

we find a euphony that contributes in beauty of sound to the beauty of the image for an effect that resonates more within the reader.

2. The heart of the poem     

            In The Afterlife, Collins posits the idea, that, in death, people move off in all imaginable directions, each according to his own private belief. So far, given the options, it’s certainly a broadly agreeable approach to the subject. And yes, I realize that that’s not too out of the ordinary for Billy and I might be inclined to call it a bit vanilla or facile, but 1. It seems just as likely a scenario as any, given the odds of any, and 2. I’m not sure that it doesn’t mirror Billy’s actual beliefs. This isn’t the first time he’s touched on the concept of the personalized hereafter. In the poem “Writing in the Afterlife,” for example, in the next world, he winds up suffering a writer’s damnation, being ferried through murky waters, naked and scribbling furiously for what will be an eternity at the command of “the man holding the oar.” Plus, it wouldn’t make any sense (if he were a devout Catholic or Buddhist or what have you) to preach; to blindly offend, using a poem as a soapbox before the mute (especially when the jury’s still out on which religion, if any, is the one and true).

Also, it seems a bit stronger an idea when we realize that he’s taken it a step further: through silent Lazarus, and the alcove in one’s head, he’s made fable out of the heaven and hell we’ve all grown up hearing about. He’s sapped the power from the supernatural and leveled the playing field by placing it in the hands of the individual (there goes the curtain of the temple, pay no attention to that man behind it), and that little quip leads me to quick my next point: a good example of why Collins is where he is and I’m writing this essay is that, unlike me, Collins is too whip smart, far too clever, to so quickly and simply, reduce Jesus to a diffident man behind a green curtain because they spotted the opportunity tie a reference of the death of Jesus in with one of The Wizard of Oz. That debasement wasn’t the goal. Collins knew precisely how much wind he needed to edit out of Jehovah’s sail, and that’s precisely how much he took. That is to say, he didn’t contest that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and, I feel, that that is an important distinction to make. It’s not black and white. Collins didn’t destroy God to create this notion, this new afterlife. He left him right there among the other characters (real or not) in our imagination. Some of the souls that Collins mentions, in death, immediately found themselves singing in the celestial choir so it’s that cohabitation of all the constituents of imagination that seem to further lend to the power of and life in imagination as a theme in the poem.    

            For much of the poem, the reader most likely feels that the subject at hand is, no surprise, The Afterlife and they are on a mere whimsical break from their day, walking with Billy through this new other world he’s painted in shades of humor and the mundane. They meet the female God, a woman in her forties with short wiry hair and glasses hanging from her neck by a string. They watch, with Billy, as a number of souls are shot into a funnel of flashing colors, a zone of light, white as a January sun. They see those who believed in reincarnation squeezing into the bodies of animals – eagles and leopards – (oh, my). They pass by the humorous image of a few classicists being led to an underworld guarded by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog (American author and educator and the compiler of one of the standard works of classical mythology, she was recognized as “the greatest woman classicist), and, finally, they observe how the rest of the souls just lie on their backs in their coffins, wishing they could return to the living. And it’s here, at the end of the poem, where we look for the magic. It’s here, as the poem begins to close, that Collins consistently proves and reproves his theory on humor as a gateway to the heart. It’s here, where Collins makes his point, reveals his true message: that the poem was never about the afterlife. It was never about death or Edith Hamilton; and there was no Lazarus. It was never about a coal chute, golden ladder. It was never about a short, wiry haired female God in her forties. It was never about the ultimate elsewhere and chorus girls. It was about the ultimate here and chorus girls. It was about the white January sun and singing as if you’d being doing it forever. In the final stanza, these souls that just lie on their backs wishing to be alive again finally strike the chord one would expect out of this subject; finally bring the tone from zany and mundane to an almost holy reverence. We picture them, just as alive once as we are now, just as real, just as human and we’ve already forgotten the big air conditioned room, misplaced the three-headed dog. We realize why Collins began and ended the poem with us: to remind us of the beauty and immeasurable value of brushing our teeth compared to being one of the souls in a coffin no longer able to seize such a small moment.  We think of how we, too, want to see the pyramids that these souls, these neighbors, uncles, florists missed the first time around, perhaps, the only time around. And we want to go with them, we want to go for them, we want to go for us. And, in that final stanza, that moment, if only for a blink, if only as the glint of a feeling, the thrown whisper from a current too deep to trace, we make a secret pact with ourselves (we, the less inventive, the little units of energy, the chorus girls, the classicists), or we announce it in a Burger King, suddenly inured of nothing while every local smallness bears witness in the rhythm of our heartbeat, in the pulsing, electric, puerility of the now: that we won’t let a light rain spoil our next round, we’ll let our slice spoil it as God intended, and if we don’t make it to the pyramids, we’ll make to the window, the winter trees, we’ll search them for what those souls might have left for us in the snow, suggestions for tomorrow.