My Number Billy Collins
Mica Withington
One theme in Billy Collins's "No Time" is that people focus on the wrong things in life and time passes quickly, showing the importance of paying attention to the right things. Collins uses setting and diction throughout the pom to effectively communicate this theme.
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Billy Collins's "No Time" is a poem that describes the speaker hurrying on aweekday morning to get to an unspecified location. While driving, he or shepasses the cemetery in which the speaker's parents are buried. Rather thanpause or stop, the speaker continues on while imagining that the fatherdisapproves and sits up while the mother tells the father to lie back down inhis grave.
Ultimately, this eight-line poem points to the theme of precious time inlife passing too quickly as people waste it uselessly. The setting of acemetery speaks to the idea of life itself being transient. Yet, rather thandirectly dealing with the truth of the ephemeral nature of life, the speakerchooses to ignore a precious moment with his or her parents in favor of anothererrand in the first stanza. Primarily, Collins utilizes diction in a way thatcaptures the theme clearly. The words "rush," "tap the horn," and "speed past"communicate a sense of hurry in the speaker's life. However, that hurry becomesa waste because the speaker then reveals in line five that he or she spends therest of the day thinking about his or her parents. The speaker states, "Then,all day, I think of him rising up." So, Collins effectively creates a sense ofregret on the part of the speaker and calls readers to examine how they usetheir own time.
Eason, Phoebe. "What is the theme of "No Time" by Billy Collins and how does he convey it?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 26 Apr. 2020, -collins/questions/what-is-the-theme-of-no-time-by-billy-collins-and-2269447.
The title of the poem, "No Time," provide a significant clue as to the themeof the poem. The speaker says that he is "In a rush" on a weekday morning. Sucha feeling is familiar to most of us: rushing to get to work or school, we don'twant to be late, and sometimes we feel that we have no time tospare.
However, in a completely different and more significant way, the speaker'sdeceased parents have no time; they have no time left to live at allbecause they are dead and gone. The speaker's perception of his own lack oftime seems to pale in comparison to his parents's literal lack of time. He saysthat, for the rest of the day, he imagines his father "rising up" from hisgrave "to give [him] that look / of knowing disapproval." It would seem, then,that the speaker's father wants him to slow down. It's a good reminder for thespeaker that life is short and we run out of time before we knowit.
Guggenheim, Laura. "What is the theme of "No Time" by Billy Collins and how does he convey it?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 6 May 2020, -collins/questions/what-is-the-theme-of-no-time-by-billy-collins-and-2269447.
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