14. Grapes, Song Lyrics and Moths: Billy Collins "Japan" and why it's mostly awesome

Japan by Billy Collins

Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.

I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.

I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.

And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It's the one about the one-ton temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.

When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.

When I say it at the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.

And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

I absolutely love this poem and I really enjoyed doing the Haiku practice for class…can’t wait to try and work it into a poem sort of like this one.

This poem is great because it really explains how I think a lot of us feel about poetry and I know it illustrates perfectly my opinion: That your poem is to be given to the reader to be reader and be interpreted by their own life-lenses. Every person will read it differently, and every reading, as suggested above, may be different.

I was surprised by the stanza:

It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.

Though the image is nice, I’m not sure how I feel about the meaning behind it. The idea that it’s “perfect” was the first thing that struck me--sometimes don’t you have a reading of a poem that isn’t entirely perfect? That leaves you feeling some heightened emotion you’d rather not feel? So there’s that, but I’m also not sure about the analogy of a grape. Grapes basically taste exactly the same each time you eat them, and in this case he’s eating the SAME grape…I don’t know how well that lends to the message of getting something new from the poem each time. I think I understand what he meant--the grape is the poem, and he’s just explaining that he’s reading it over and over and it’s the same poem--but I would have liked to see some foreshadowing of the array of meanings he’ll eventually get from it, later in the poem.

I love the images of him walking through the house and talking to the dog, and I particularly enjoyed this stanza:

I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.

Not only is the rhythm here great, but he says a lot with such a simplified idea--something all of us can relate to with songs, right? When it’s in your head and you’re not sure you want it to be. You wake up singing it to yourself, not sure when you started, and then you’re singing it to yourself in the kitchen until someone reminds you to stop? This packs all of that in to just three lines, without actually coming out and saying it.

And last but not least, because I have to narrow the things I like about this down so I don’t end up writing this blog post all night, I love the sudden shift in the middle and how he showed that by a change in stanzas. Just by having a couplet in the middle rather than a tercet, he tells the reader: Hey, I’m going to talk about something else now, something more metaphorical, but it’s okay, because I warned you about it right here. I think that’s great. The ending image, of a moth as a hinge hovering over the bed, is something that will stay with me for a long time.