"Some Final Words" by Billy Collins (poetry reading)

Billy Collins said that studying English at College is "majoring in death".

I have to tell you that the poem isn't historically correct. That doesn't subtract anything from it - in fact it is in keeping with the theme.

It seems brother Josef did fall unconscious from the podium but he wasn't dead. There was no sudden death. His wife brought him home to Vienna and he died there quite a while later. Nobody knows what killed him. There's a rumour that he had been beaten up by some Russian soldiers just before he collapsed.

The message is that the past is best forgotten, at best it's a fabrication. It makes no real difference now how Josef Strauss died. "History is bunk" as Henry Ford said. It's necessary to examine the historian's motivations. It was often written by the victorious to justify their deeds.

I cannot leave you without saying this:
the past is nothing,
a nonmemory, a phantom,
a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss
is composing another waltz no one can hear.
It is a fabrication, best forgotten,
a wellspring of sorrow
that waters a field of bitter vegetation.

Leave it behind.
Take your head out of your hands
and arise from the couch of melancholy
where the window-light falls against your face
and the sun rides across the autumn sky,
steely behind the bare trees,
glorious as the high strains of violins.

But forget Strauss.
And forget his younger brother,
the poor bastard who was killed in a fall
from a podium while conducting a symphony.

Forget the past,
forget the stunned audience on its feet,
the absurdity of their formal clothes
in the face of sudden death,
forget their collective gasp,
the murmur and huddle over the body,
the creaking of the lowered curtain.

Forget Strauss
with that encore look in his eye
and his tiresome industry:
more than five hundred finished compositions!
He even wrote a polka for his mother.
That alone is enough to make me flee the past,
evacuate its temples,
and walk alone under the stars
down these dark paths strewn with acorns,
feeling nothing but the crisp October air,
the swing of my arms
and the rhythms of my stepping--
a man of the present who has forgotten
every composer, every great battle,
just me,
a thin reed blowing in the night.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Some Final Words
• Billy
• Collins
• poem
• poetry

[vlopresto]

Just wonderful! What a fantastic reading!

[jeremyshambles]

grand reading, i wonder how you thought of connecting the quote about english to this poem. l like how the two ideas work together. cheers

[sonofwalt]

Extremely well read, and your commentary both succinct and insightful. Mr. Collins is often maligned for being less than poetic, but you bring out the natural music and rhythm written in these lines.

To paraphrase Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway, isn't it amazing how we live, making it all up around us as we go along?