An Afternoon with Irish Cow by Billy Collins In an interview with Billy Collins, he states ‘a poem actually can have either no point or a very nuanced point. It also depends to some extent on how the poem is taken in by the reader or the listener…poetry is the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.’ These words may be helpful in trying to understand or avoid overinterpreting what initially appears as a very literal poem that narrates the persona’s largely plain experience one ‘Afternoon with Irish Cows’. The poem contains five stanzas of seven lines of free verse, and this helps to move the poem beyond the prosaic, dull and commonplace. The opening stanza is ordinary and nonchalant in tone. For example, the persona ‘would sometimes pass a window and look out’. Here, the persona is simply observing their surroundings and initially describes a very mundane and passive activity, much like the vague ‘few dozen’ cows ‘stepping all day from tuft to tuft’. However, this short third line has a subtle lyrical bounce that could suggest the unexpected elegance of these beasts of burden, captured by the soft onomatopoeic quality of the repeated word ‘tuft’. The end of the stanza takes twist as the field is ‘suddenly empty’ and the poet uses a whimsical simile ‘as if they taken wing, flown off to another country.’ This implies the persona has been day-dreaming and is surprised by the movement of the mundane domesticated animals who he thought moved very slowly and did very little but graze all day long. The pun on “if pigs could fly” and the hyperbole of the simile also captures the irony that it is poet that has done very little and appears to require this flight of fancy in order to understand something of the beauty of such ordinary farm animals. The poem also plays the on the folklore that the sight of a herd of the cows lying down in a field is a good sign that rain is on its way. It is as if these beasts can predict the future by ‘lying down…waiting for rain./How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded’. The use of a list of three and the repetition of ‘how’ builds an enchanted tone and the mystery surrounding these largely silent cows. The situation is again reversed, where it is almost as if the persona becomes speechless with amazement at the humdrum spectacle on ‘long quiet afternoons.’ Time seems to stand still in this quiet and remote rural area and the persona again seems to find escape from time’s monotony in the ‘black-and-white maps of their sides’, which alludes to connotations of travel and perhaps to the Ireland of the title. The seeming silence of the poem is broken in the third stanza ‘a sound so phenomenal’ that the persona simply has to stop his daily activities, such as reading a paper or cutting an apple, to see what is going on. The poet uses further ironic hyperbole as he describes the sound as something like ‘being torched/or pierced through the side with a long spear’, presumably only to find that this is the natural sound of a cow’s “moo”. The effect is humorous and yet the violent imagery creates a sympathy for the cow who is may seem to be a ‘tortured’ animal. Furthermore, the connotations of ‘stone wall’ suggest its prison-like environment and trapped condition, which may again reflect the mood of the persona. The fourth stanza continues with the idea that ‘it sounded like pain’. However, upon closer inspection, the persona provides a very different picture of the ‘noisy one, anchored there on all fours’. In this stanza, the cow is personified with the phrase ‘she gave voice/to the rising, full bodied cry’. The cow may appear fixed, trapped and in pain and yet, as the final stanza explains, ‘Then I knew she was only announcing/the large, unadulterated cowness of herself’. This transforms the ‘bellowing head’ into something harmonious, unique and pure. The use of the unusual and informal suffix of ‘cowness’ suggests that the cow’s piercing “moo” is an expression of her “being” that completes her identity. The tone is again ironically comical and serious, as the poet mixes the mundane and sacred in describing the simple sound of a cow as something enlightened. For example, the ‘laboring upward’ and ‘rising…that began in the darkness of her belly/and echoed up’ repeats the movement of ‘soaring’ towards something higher. Furthermore, the connotations of ‘laboring’ suggests that the cow is either pregnant or possibly performing some type of ‘mating’ call. The use of the female pronoun also illustrates that these cows are all of the same sex. They are all female cattle that are farmed to produce milk and ironically highlights the unnatural setting of the farmed ‘green fields’. The final stanza possibly captures the conflict with the male persona as the cow regarded him ‘above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.’ The reasons for the conflict are not given but in ‘pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind’ it is as if the cow is providing a defence of herself. Again, the irony is that her explanation of herself is her very reason for being. The primal ‘cowness’ is in essence its own justification. The conclusion seems that the persona or reader should equally be themselves in their own unique identity. Question- Explore the poet’s thoughts and feelings about Irish cows. ‘Watching for Dolphins’ by David Constantine ‘Watching for Dolphins’ is not as straightforward as the title denotes. On the surface, it seems to tell a simple, uneventful narrative about tourists passively watching for dolphins while crossing by boat to Piraeus, the busy port which lies a short distance south of Athens, the ancient Greek capital. The poem is ambiguous and its tone can be interpreted in a number of radically different ways, from cynically ironic to one of harmless naïve happiness. The ‘serious / Looks’ of the strangers can be contrasted with the ‘smiling’ mischievous ‘satyrs’, and hints at the folly of the lifeless travelers, possibly alienated as part of modern cultures’ industrialised tourism and lifestyles. The stanzas oscillate between factual descriptions in prose-like lines, with stanzas of incredulous religious imagery offering false hope and empty ‘epiphany’. The use of enjambment over lines and stanzas, and the almost glib irregular rhymes and halfrhymes mirror the lack of any satisfying conclusion to the journey, which ends on a gloomy note with the customers dispersing ‘under their chains / In the black water.’ The poems deep cynicism is masked by the apparent “normality” of such routine but disappointed behaviour. The opening stanza emphasizes the alienation of the passengers. For example, there was ‘no acknowledgement of common purpose’, which creates a sense of estrangement. The stanza finishes with a caesura that begins ‘One saw them lose’ before its long enjambment to the next stanza. This cutting off of the complete phrases again creates a sense of dislocation and fragmentation that emphasizes the peoples’ loss and taken on its own suggests a sense of hopelessness. The half-rhymes also add a tone of ironic bathos, where ‘rose’ becomes ‘lose’ and further the sense of dejection. In the second and third stanzas, a personal yet common ‘desire’ and ‘longing’ becomes almost mock-spiritual and religious in its intensity, and it is touched with a sense of desperation. For example, ‘a fat man…Stared like a saint, through sad-bi-focals’; the desperate desire for the gulls to be a ‘sign’; ‘all, unaccustomed, wanted epiphany’. The fat man seems a desperate figure and the reference to his poor eyesight suggests he is very unlikely to see anything at all. The only dignity of watching for dolphins so docilely is given to children, who might be forgiven for staring so naively and fixatedly ‘Sat in a silent school’. The sibilance of the phrase adds a further note of dejection. For the adults, there is a suggestion that the act of ‘watching’ is one of bad faith and delusion ‘day after day’, possibly as simple distraction and in order to avoid making any attempt to communicate with one’s fellow species who are equally trapped on the routine tourist boat. The fourth stanza raises the frustrating uncertainty to a ‘climax of our longing’, where the world of the ‘abused Aegean’, once a place of mythical epic legend is now a desperate ‘prayer’ for the real ‘we could not imagine’ and the hyperbole of the ‘clang…cymbal, gong and drum’ seems wholly delusional if not mocking and comic. In the end, the epiphany doesn't happen, and the poem ends anti-climactically. The ‘smiling’ mischievous ‘satyrs’ do not appear and what would have created jubilation, ‘we should have laughed and lifted the children up’ as the dolphins were ‘Looping the keel’ creates a sense of disappointment a, abandonment and dissatisfaction. The lilting alliteration of the ‘l’ in these phrases is ironic as the celebration and climax is never achieved. The final stanza concludes the unproductive journey, as the passengers enter the port ‘under their chains / In the black water.’ The forlorn and despairing imagery is repressed as the customers disembark with ‘Eyes cast down/With no admission of disappointment’. The final line shows the quickly forgotten disappointment as the passengers ‘Dispersed and prepared to land in the city’. The dream and hope has quickly faded and only the bleak prospect of Athens, a city well-known for its smog and pollution are the new destination. This is emphasized by the poet’s use of ‘city’ as the final world. The poem obliquely draws attention to an urbanised world corrupted by tourism, materialism, shallow 'surface' experience and one polluted with industrialisations ‘great tankers’. The old Greek mythological world of heroes and epic tales are replaced by a more realistic mundane existence that only offers false hope and disappointment for those without sufficient imagination. Question- The above poem reverberates (resounds) on many levels, but ultimately it’s about the difficulty of locating the spiritual and the numinous(magical ) in today’s world. Comment.
