Billy Collins and Margaret Atwood: lyric poetry and metaphor analysis

Billy Collins' poem is a lyric poem because mainly it expresses highly personal emotions and feelings. Many lyric poems involve musical themes or tones, and in fact in Shakespeare's era the word "lyric" meant that the poem was accompanied by a musical instrument (a lyre). But while Collins' poem doesn't give off a musical idea or theme (unless the sound of a fork scratching across a granite table is music), it does use metaphor and achieves a dramatic impact.

The metaphor has two people, presumably married and in a love partnership who have divorced. (It is known that although un-married couples who have been together for a long time and break up are also involved essentially in a "divorce" of their partnership.) The metaphor of "two spoons" shows two people locked together, snuggling would be a good word, in a warm bed. "Tined" means prongs on a fork -- or it means pieces separated by a space, which forks are. So from a spoon (smooth and round) to a fork (sharp with separate prongs) is a very good metaphor for divorce. And on that granite table (which is a cold, hard image) there is nothing more than the forks and knives (knives could be the attorneys they hired to consummate their breakup).

Question #2

The Margaret Atwood poem could well be used as a monologue. It is story-telling in poetic form. There is an ongoing metaphor (the wild river that carries a person on a certain course through life) and the reader knows there is not really a raging river in the line, "the dangerous river of his own birth." The one, "on a landscape stranger than Uranus" brings to mind the poem / song, "Stranger in a strange land." The theme is greatly strengthened by the metaphor because everyone knows that rivers have currents, and when there is heavy rain or a storm of some kind the river's current becomes a dangerous dynamic that takes whatever is in the river exactly where it wants to. A person, or a log, or a boat may die in that out of control river and a young son apparently had an accident and hence he had to be "planted him in the country like a flag" (a cemetery).

Question #4

The Snodgrass use of seemingly unrelated details -- trivial details -- actually will reverberate with familiarity for anyone who has stayed in a cheap motel (or just a motel with its middle class trappings and services). Don't take the ashtrays, don't take anything from the motel (not the flowers either) because the motel owner might try to punish the family, or otherwise treat it unfairly. They don't mention the Kleenex box or the toilet paper (which many motel guests take with them), but they do mention not taking the flowers in the room that the renters brought in. In fact saying they will be preserved for the next guest in that room is one of the main themes of this poem: leave things better than when you arrived. That could apply to friendships, family gatherings, or campgrounds. Be thoughtful, don't take, and instead be a giver, someone who cares and leaves a thoughtful legacy.