Poem of the Day

This poem was suggested by a reader and I’m so glad to have found it. I went to college in Richmond, and drove down Monument Avenue many times. I don’t remember if I asked someone about the different poses of the statues, or I just heard about it. Lee died 5 years after the Civil War, and his (statue) horse has all four legs on the ground. Jeb Stuart was mortally wounded at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, and died the next day (his horse has one leg raised). Stonewall Jackson is a little trickier. I suppose he was not wounded in the heat of battle, but you could argue that he did succumb to effects from a wound sustained during a battle. His horse has all four hoofs on the ground, though. However, according to Wikipedia and Snopes, the whole equestrian sculpture theory is not supported by evidence. I still like the idea, though.

I enjoyed reading this interview with Collins, in which the genesis of the poem is described.

Statues in the Park
By Billy Collins

I thought of you today
when I stopped before an equestrian statue
in the middle of a public square,

you who had once instructed me
in the code of these noble poses.

A horse rearing up with two legs raised,
you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.

If only one leg was lifted,
the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;

and if four legs were touching the ground,
as they were in this case—
bronze hooves affixed to a stone base—
it meant that the man on the horse,

this one staring intently
over the closed movie theater across the street,
had died of a cause other than war.

In the shadow of the statue,
I wondered about the others
who had simply walked through life
without a horse, a saddle, or a sword—

pedestrians who could no longer
place one foot in front of the other.

I pictured statues of the sickly
recumbent on their cold stone bed,
the suicides toeing the marble edge,

statues of accident victims covering their eyes,
and murdered covering their wounds,
the drowned silently treading the air.

And there was I,
up on a rosy-gray block of granite
near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,
my name and dates pressed into a plaque,

down on my knees, eyes lifted,
praying to the passing clouds,
forever begging for just one more day.