Nostalgia
The poem Nostalgia by
Billy Collins is a dreal comedy, a story told through what I felt to be a wise
old man looking back into the past. The
speaker is asking the reader to remember back on Americas historical memory’s,
enjoyed and shared by so many. The
speaker goes as far back as 1340 (well before his time), when he talks about a
dance called the Catapult, and other joys of the time. The Speaker is the only
character in Nastagia and his tone possesses a bittersweet longing for something
else somewhere else.
My mind was immediately sucked in to the poem Nostalgia.
The last sentence of paragraph one reminded me immediately of countless occasions
where a person who was older, and probably much wiser, had said to me something
like, “Long ago things where better, Not like today”. In my eyes that is a wide
spread experience of being alive and in your youth. So, when Billy Collins
wrote “Everything was hand- lettered then, Not like today” as a reader I quickly
looked for more signals of the speaker being less than content with the present.
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