The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins

In Billy Collins's poem The Art of Drowning, he begins by negatively introducing the flashes of our lives one believes to see before they die. He declares that "while you drown," your life flashes before your eyes; however, he attributes panic or submergence to "startle" and commence this vision. Collins personifies "time" when he explains that it is panic which "startles time into such compression." Time, as a result of a sudden, unpredictable emotion, panic, is forced to hastily collect constituents of a person's life without being given much notice, and so "decades" must be crushed. The use of crushed connotes that these flashes are violently assembled to a dying person; furthermore, the construction of these last visions appear to be forced and irrelevant to one's life. Thus, our "desperate, final seconds" conclude in "vice," or wickedness. Collins subtly communicates already at the start of the poem that these last flashes of our lives are in fact not as brilliant as many "survivors" have indicated. Although these survivors also proclaim that the flashes are "bolts of truth," the only flash one will see "will probably be a fish." Collins rejects the possibility of these supernatural visions to exist by degrading them to be nothing more than a fish. One questions then how Collins perceives the human race. Does he believe that society construes theories so that people are less frightened by death? Or is he trying to eliminate a person's fear of the flashes they are supposed to receive before they pass?

Travels to the Light

As Janie desperately seeks for her "world to be made," Ree also dreams of fulfilling her aspirations. This picture illustrates how each character possess a dark, gloomy side, but at the same time they aspire to obtain a life of content and light. Within the picture, both Janie and Ree begin on the left, in darkness, and throughout the novel and their journeys; however, they always see illumination and brightness ahead of them. Their travels are driven in hope of reaching lightness, whether it to obtain contentedness or peace.