Litany

The bread, the very first metaphor introduced in the poem, borrowed from Jacques Crickillon’s original work, bookends the piece.

Crickillon uses the bread as a contrast to the wine, between homestead comforts and worldly pleasure, relying on the cultural associations of bread with domestic safety: In the Bible, bread is the symbol of life itself; in European folklore, carrying a piece of bread in one’s pocket offers protection from otherworldly threats. Crickillon’s image of bread is a metonym, a poetic device in which a small aspect of something stands in for the whole: by comparing his female beloved to bread, Crickillon’s speaker means that she represents home.

Collins, however, veers away from this straightforward and clichéd use of the symbol. Instead, he focuses on the fact that Crickillon insists that his beloved is both bread and knife—a nonsensical contradiction that the original poem fails to explain. To heighten the parody, Collins ends his poem by repeating Crickillon’s metaphor three times with slight variations: “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 interjection of contemporary, non-romantic phrases like “don’t worry,” “still,” and “you will always be,” makes the repetition comical, as the phrase “the bread and the knife” loses universal symbolic meaning and becomes instead an inside joke between two long-term partners.