Hey everyone i need analysis fast on the poem "Velocity" by Billy Collins. Please help me, thanks

Byron, the poem is under copyright, so here's a link to where it can be read:

[msnbc.msn.com]

In the poem he's comparing himself (and everyone else) to a motorcyclist who's face and hair is being blown by the wind. He says we are all being blown by the wind at the speed of life.

A satellite revolving around the earth has to travel 17,500 mph to keep up with it, so he might be right about us all speeding toward our deaths.

Les

>A satellite revolving around the earth has to travel 17,500 mph to keep up

Since the circumference of the earth is a little short of 25,000 miles, that seems a bit too quick. At that speed one would make a complete circle in about 90 minutes.

Here is another copy of the Collins "poem", in stanzas (4+3) easier to read:

[tinyurl.com]

At least he is honest,

"but there was nothing to write
about "

>A satellite revolving around the earth has to travel 17,500 mph to keep up

Sorry, Hugh, this was the speed of the space shuttles as they circled the earth, according to NASA.

The speed of most communication satellites, according to the following website is around 7,000 mph, still pretty fast.

[ask.yahoo.com]


Les



Post Edited (05-19-04 11:13)

Depends on how far up you are. Communications satellites go round in 24 hours just keeping pace with their ground station, so only need 7000mph. Lower orbit satellite travel faster, the early sputniks did go round the earth in 90mins. Don't you remember the Midsummer Night's Dream quotes we used to get in those days? The shuttles spend part of their descent imitating flying bricks.

Hey,

I have an English assesment Due in on Wednesday.
*I have to recite the poem "Bradman's Last Innings-John Foulcher"
*I have to do a 2minute talk about the poem...analysising it
*And have a visual presentation.

Bradmans Last Innings

Bowled for a duck, you could have asked for better...
From the first, through the years of Depression, so many came to seeyou, forgetting the dole queues, the homes dull with a long democracy. And then the war, women waiting for their Saturday oval husbands. And peace. Padded up against, you gave people something the world lacked: rules to play by, winners, clear white flannels sharp against the green turf. But it never works out, never - four runs short of that century average, at the last, betrayed by your own game.

Can you please help me on analysising this poem?

Thank-you.

Hey,

I have an English assesment Due in on Wednesday.
*I have to recite the poem "Bradman's Last Innings-John Foulcher"
*I have to do a 2minute talk about the poem...analysising it
*And have a visual presentation.

Bradmans Last Innings

Bowled for a duck, you could have asked for better...
From the first, through the years of Depression, so many came to seeyou, forgetting the dole queues, the homes dull with a long democracy. And then the war, women waiting for their Saturday oval husbands. And peace. Padded up against, you gave people something the world lacked: rules to play by, winners, clear white flannels sharp against the green turf. But it never works out, never - four runs short of that century average, at the last, betrayed by your own game.

Can you please help me on analysising this poem?

Thank-you.

Its about cricket, what the game and Don Bradman's skill meant to the spectators.

Bet IanB can give the details, its my bedtime.

Thanks, Linda, but I wasn't paying attention. This should have been in a new topic thread. Guess it's too late now to help Sarah Jane.

In the quoted text, the first 'against' should surely be 'again'.

Can't say I like the text much. Not just because I'm prejudiced against so-called poems that lack line endings. Its meaning is clear enough - to anyone who knows about Australian cricket and Don Bradman's career. Its tone and implications about him strike me as entirely wrong. Yes, his super-stellar achievements gave the Australian public something to cheer and feel proud about during the depression years; but applause wasn't his motivation, and he was far too great a sportsman to be self-pitying about being bowled for a duck in his final innings some 15 years later, and just missing a century career average.

The poem seeks to project on to him a victim mentality ('you could have asked for better' ... 'betrayed by your own game'), that would be belittling if not so at odds with the facts. It reveals more about the gloomy and cynical nature of the poetic persona, than it says about the Don. To the persona, stable democracy makes home life dull; housewives during WWII did nothing but wait for the return of their soldier husbands; the post-War world lacked any winners or worthwhile rules outside Bradman's cricket field; and life 'never works out, never'. The persona can empathise only with failure. That sort of character remains stuck in the depression that Bradman is supposed to have lifted.

Incidentally, there's an entertaining one-act Australian play 'The Don's Last Innings' by Timothy Daly, about a man so obsessed with Bradman's failure to make the four runs needed in his final innings to achieve the magic century average, that he keeps reliving the event in his mind, trying to change the result.