Litany

The poem’s title is a play on its genre: “Litany” is an example of a blazon, or a poem that enumerates a (typically female) lover’s positive attributes through a list of hyperbolic similes and metaphors. This style of love poetry is extremely old; examples include the Song of Songs from the Old Testament (see: Further Reading & Resources). Mocking the overblown comparisons blazons usually deploy is also a fairly old maneuver. For example, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (see: Further Reading & Resources), deflates the appearance of his beloved, acknowledging that it could never match the wild extremes of blazon and pointing out that unrealistic comparisons actually devalue love. Collins picks up this tradition. The word “litany,” which means a boring and tedious recited list, announces his intention to mock the blazon genre from the outset.

“Litany” opens with an epigraph, or a citation of another work of literature; in this case, the epigraph is two lines of an untitled love poem by Belgian poet Jacques Crickillon. When asked about this epigraph, Collins joked, “When you see a poem that seems to fail you can just rewrite it and improve upon it that way” (Armenti, Peter. “The Bread, the Knife, and the Source of Billy Collins’s Poem ‘Litany’,” From the Catbird Seat; 2018). “Litany” follows from trying to take the lines Crickillon composed at face value and thus immediately seeing them as contradictory and nonsensical. Rather than enumerating a beloved’s traits through serious, exaggerated metaphor, Collins creates a list of comparisons that grow increasingly ludicrous and comical.

In this first stanza, the metaphors transition from a domestic to a pastoral setting. The first two repeat Crickillon’s own, though as will become clear at the end of the poem, Collins is highlighting their illogical nature. How could the beloved be both “bread” and “knife” (Line 1), when one is a tool for cutting the other? How could they be both “goblet” and “wine” (Line 2)—one a consumable, the other a vessel? The intention of these metaphors is to connect the beloved to objects of deep significance: Bread is the biblical staff of life, sacred in many cultures, while wine is often associated with physical pleasure and luxury. However, the metaphors’ clichéd nature prompts Collins to produce metaphors that also seemingly point to universal symbolism while being either purposefully hackneyed or clearly parodic.

Collins’s first pastoral metaphors are immediately at odds with one another. The beloved is “dew” on the grass (Line 3) and at the same time “the burning wheel of the sun” (Line 4). In other words, the beloved is both water condensate and the heat that evaporates it—standard images of morning in the countryside that here negate one another. Next, the beloved becomes the “white apron of the baker” (Line 5)—the uniform of an artisan who is traditionally an early riser. The connection to the previous lines is temporal—the morning is when the baker begins their work. The last line of the stanza, “the marsh birds suddenly in flight” (Line 6), introduces movement to the scene, foreshadowing a turn in the poem’s tone.

The second stanza opens with the word “However” (Line 7), marking the poem’s twist away from a subtle skewering of effusive devotional poetry into a more obvious inversion: a list of metaphors that the beloved is not. Here, the parodic tone of the poem comes to the fore, as readers question why the beloved would fit the comparisons in the first stanza and not in the second, when both sets of metaphors are equally vague and nonspecific. The speaker declares that the beloved is nothing like the “wind in the orchard” (Line 7), an image that so closely echoes the birds in the previous line that the definitive statement is amusingly confounding. Why would the beloved be like the flying birds but not the breeze their wings create? Because neither comparison actually explains which aspect of the metaphor makes it appropriate to the beloved, the reader can only shrug and move on. The next inverted metaphor, a mention of “plums on the counter” (Line 8), is an allusion to another famous free verse love poem: “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams (see: Further Reading & Resources), which begins:

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox (“This Is Just to Say”; Lines 1-4).

Is the beloved not like Williams’s plums because room-temperature fruits on the counter are less delicious than the cold ones from the icebox? Collins’s poem declines to explain. The next negative comparison seemingly makes more sense: The beloved is not “a house of cards” (Line 9)—an object of proverbial fragility.

The next few lines introduce a new element of humor into the poem, as Collins juxtaposes modern speech with the old-fashioned elevated language of blazon poetry: “you are certainly not the pine-scented air. / There is just no way you are the pine-scented air. (Lines 10-11). In this couplet, the speaker considers a comparison seemingly in real time, definitively ruling out a smell readers are equally likely to associate with a forest as with a cleaning product or taxi air freshener. The colloquial “There is just no way” disrupts the formality of the poem so far, a shift in register that is funny because it is so unexpected.

In the third stanza, the speaker allows that their beloved may be indeed be comparable to a few more specific and less clichéd images: “the fish under the bridge” and “the pigeon on the general’s head” (Lines 12-13). With the introduction of architectural and sculptural elements, we move settings from the pastoral to the urban. The unspecified “marsh birds” of the first stanza are here transformed into a more familiar element of modern life—a city pigeon resting on the head of a statue. Unlike the preceding metaphors, this one carries more defined associations, as the pigeon shows the same disregard for the high-status general as Collins does for the genre he is parodying. The more the beloved is like this iconoclastic city bird, the less they have in common in another clichéd visual, “the field of cornflowers at dusk” (Line 15).

The burst of modern reality continues in the next stanza, where the speaker suggests that the beloved could confirm the fittingness of the comparisons the poem offers with “A quick look in the mirror” (Line 16). Here, Collins is referring to another aspect of blazon poetry: the reductive objectification of the beloved. This genre of poetry, no matter how ostensibly complementary, typically does not allow a beloved to have a voice; rather, only the poet-speaker has the power to paint the beloved in whatever way they choose. By pointing out that the beloved could simply behold a reflection and form opinions without any input the speaker, the poem veers away from this power dynamic.

The next stanza continues this by turning the focus of strange metaphors onto the speaker and away from the beloved altogether. The speaker prefaces this with a contemporary turn of phrase that could be read as diffident or passive aggressive: “It may interest you to know” (Line 19), a funny introduction to becoming the object under scrutiny. The expression highlights the fact that while blazons depend on the beloved’s beauty, they elide any mention of the typically male poet-speaker’s appearance—his qualifications are mental and creative, while hers are purely decorative.

The poem here embeds its most salient critique of the genre and the specific poem Collins is parodying: Before the speaker applies a series of confounding metaphors to themself, the poem references “the plentiful imagery of the world” (Line 20). Poets have an almost infinite set of images to use as metaphor, which means that comparisons must be deeply thought out rather than relying on familiar images that are evocative on the surface but ultimately meaningless. To illustrate, the speaker compares themself to traditional metaphors of rain, stars, and the moon—metaphors that explain nothing about who they might be as a person or why the beloved might value them. The speaker follows these shallow comparisons with a pair of images whose specificity recalls the pigeon on the sculpture: “the evening paper blowing down an alley, / and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table […] / and the blind woman’s teacup” (Lines 23-26). We cannot immediately attribute meaning to these visuals, which read like private jokes or memories between the speaker and the beloved, giving us a glimpse into their lived reality that contrasts with universalizing and thus less personal metaphors.

As the poem comes to its conclusion, the speaker returns to the quotation that began the poem. However, this time, rather than saddling the beloved with descriptions without the ability to respond, the speaker is much more playing and jesting in approach: “Don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife / You are still the bread and the knife / You will always be the bread and the knife” (Lines 27-29) the speaker assures. The comic repetition of the metaphor renders its actual meaning moot—instead, we can discern the warmth, closeness, and humor between speaker and beloved in the interstitial words “don’t worry,” “still,” “always be”—these little colloquialisms demonstrate how an overblown and distancing, not to mention nonsensical, comparison becomes an inside joke between the two that will endure long after the litany of metaphors has ended. The true connection lies in the shared experience of examining this metaphor and finding it wanting.

The poem ends on a joke that highlights the problem with the epigram’s other metaphor, as the speaker notes that just as the beloved will forever laughingly be called “the bread and the knife,” the same goes for “the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine” (Line 30).

This “somehow” underscores for the reader the impossibility of this comparison. The beloved cannot be both wine and goblet, making the high-flown language ludicrous. This ending, which not only mocks blazon but also invites the beloved to laugh alongside the speaker demonstrates better than any litany of attributes could that love is worth celebrating as something real.