19 pages • 38 minutes read
Billy CollinsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
A litany is a list-like series of formulaic pleas, most often used for religious purposes; the word also connotes a boring and tedious recitation of something in list form. Collins merges this second meaning of the term and the classic poetic structure of the blazon, or a poem enumerating a beloved’s best qualities via a series of metaphors, and inverts it, joining the humorous tradition of the counterblazon.
The poem consists of an epigram followed by seven stanzas of varying lengths. It is written in Collins’s distinctive free verse, lacking meter or rhyme. However, Collins uses repetition to give the poem a sense of rhythm.
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