Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Creatures" by Billy Collins delves into the vivid imagination of childhood, where inanimate objects and patterns hold the power to transform into living entities, embodying emotions and stories. The poem explores the boundary between the animate and inanimate, drawing on the speaker's personal experiences of perceiving faces and creatures in the mundane objects surrounding him during his youth. Through this reflection, Collins touches on themes of imagination, perception, and the human tendency to seek connection and meaning in the natural and constructed world.

The opening reference to Hamlet seeing shapes in clouds immediately situates the reader in a world where imagination and reality blur. Unlike Hamlet, however, the speaker of the poem encounters his creatures not in the ephemeral formations of the sky but in the solid, enduring materials of his childhood home. Furniture, with its "surfaces of wood," becomes a canvas for the young speaker’s imagination, trapping ethereal creatures within its grains. These trapped figures, "submerged in a polished sideboard," "frowning from a chair-back," or "howling from my mother’s silent bureau," are imbued with emotion and presence, transforming ordinary household objects into vessels of mystery and melancholy.

Collins skillfully extends this motif beyond wood to include "a swirling pattern of wallpaper" and "the various greens of a porcelain lamp," demonstrating the pervasive nature of the human mind to imbue its environment with life and narrative. These creatures, "so melancholy, so damned," appear to the speaker as if they carry the weight of untold stories, reflecting back at him his own "secrets of a secretive boy." This mirroring between the imagined creatures and the introspective child underscores a deeper connection between the individual and their environment, suggesting that these visions are not mere flights of fancy but expressions of the speaker's inner life.

The poem then transitions to a moment in adulthood, on a beach, where this childhood habit of seeing faces in objects reemerges. The speaker's companion finds a stone with a natural "face," prompting a reflection on the persistence of this imaginative projection into adulthood. However, the speaker's response to fling the stone "over the sparkle of blue waves" represents a desire to distance himself from these childhood imaginings, perhaps as an attempt to conform to adult expectations of what is considered real or rational.

Yet, the act of throwing the stone into the sea does not merely signify rejection but also a release, allowing the stone and its "freakish existence" to return to the natural world, free from human interpretation. This gesture acknowledges the power of imagination to both enchant and burden, suggesting that while we may seek to escape the fanciful perceptions of our youth, they remain a fundamental part of how we interpret and interact with the world around us.

"Creatures" captures the beauty and complexity of the human mind's capacity to find familiarity and connection in the inanimate, highlighting the thin veil between what is real and what is imagined. Through this exploration, Billy Collins invites readers to reconsider their own perceptions of the world, to acknowledge the creatures lurking in the corners of their own childhoods, and to embrace the imagination as a profound source of insight and wonder.

POEM TEXT:

Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,
but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,
creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,

one submerged in a polished sideboard,
one frowning from a chair-back,
another howling from my mother’s silent bureau,
locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak.

I would see these presences, too,
in a swirling pattern of wallpaper
or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp,
each looking so melancholy, so damned,
some peering out at me as if they knew
all the secrets of a secretive boy.

Many times I would be daydreaming
on the carpet and one would appear next to me,
the oversize nose, the hollow look.

So you will understand my reaction
this morning at the beach
when you opened your hand to show me
a stone you had picked up from the shoreline.

“Do you see the face?” you asked
as the cold surf circled our bare ankles.
“There’s the eye and the line of the mouth,
like it’s grimacing, like it’s in pain.”

“Well, maybe that’s because it has a fissure
running down the length of its forehead
not to mention a kind of twisted beak,” I said,

taking the thing from you and flinging it out
over the sparkle of blue waves
so it could live out its freakish existence
on the dark bottom of the sea

and stop bothering innocent beachgoers like us,
stop ruining everyone’s summer.

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