Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, has a clean, crisp writing style which goes hand-in-hand with the clarity of a fresh spring day. In his poem ‘Today,’ Collins expresses the childlike joy one feels on such a day, something we have all experienced with the recent sunshine in Edinburgh.
Collins opens with the conditional tense, suggestive of a potential future “spring day so perfect.” At the end of the poem, Collins invokes its title and brings the audience back to the present, revealing: “today is just that kind of day.” The poem consists of a single extended sentence divided into couplets, with irregular metre, no rhyme, and plenty of enjambment. The rambling effect this loose structure produces conveys the unbounded happiness the speaker feels as a result of the “warm intermittent breeze.”
The domestic setting of ‘Today’ invites the reader to picture flung open windows and a “garden bursting with peonies.” Across the poem, there is a pattern of this “bursting’”imagery, as though the speaker cannot calmly contain their delight. For example, they want to “rip the little door” off the canary’s cage, so the bird can experience the same freedom they feel.
In this way, the notion of expansion and liberty is contrasted against ideas of entrapment. As well as freeing the songbird, the speaker is compelled to smash open the snow-globe that sits in the living room, “releasing the inhabitants / from their snow-covered cottage.” Even with these suggestions of violence, the poem’s overwhelmingly gleeful tone continues.
The use of force in the poem does not seem sinister because the speaker’s intention is to enable everyone—songbird and figurine—to share in the joy this spring day has brought them. ‘Today’ is a fast-paced, surprising poem which neatly explores the primal response we have to springtime and sunshine.
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