#17: Duck/Rabbit by Bily Collins (Critical)

This week we read Picnic, Lighting by Billy Collins. I really enjoyed reading this collection of poetry. I liked that most of the poems were simplistic in nature and easily relatable. I also liked all of the references he made throughout many of the poems. One of my favorite was presented in his poem, Duck/Rabbit so I decided to do some more research about it.


Duck/Rabbit
by: Billy Collins

The lamb may lie down with the lion,
But they will never be as close as this pair
Who share the very lines
Of their existence, whose overlapping is their raison d’etre.
How strange and symbiotic the binds
That make one disappear
Whenever the other is spied.
Throw the duck a stare,
And the rabbit hops down his hole.
Give the rabbit the eye,
And the duck waddles off the folio.
Say, these could be our mascots, you and I—
               I could look at you forever
              And never see the two of us together.


I really liked this poem a lot. I liked the first two lines because you often hear the phrase “the lamb in the lion’s den” so I thought it was clever that he addresses the closeness of the rabbit and duck because essentially they are one. In the next several lines he goes on to elaborate on how it is impossible to see both, the duck and the rabbit, at the same time. In the end he chose to go with a rhyming couplet which is my favorite part of the entire poem. He makes the concept of the poem more tangible because he applies the relationship to people with the use of “you” and “I”. I liked the idea that the speaker was trying to use the optical illusion to essentially say that he/she could never see him/herself and the mentioned “you” existing together as a couple at any one time, just like the duck and rabbit.