Billy Collins- Neither Snow

When all of a sudden the city air filled with snow,
the distinguishable flakes
blowing sideways,
looked like krill
fleeing the maw of an advancing whale.

At least they looked that way to me
from the taxi window,
and since I happened to be sitting
that fading Sunday afternoon
in the very center of the universe,
who was in a better position
to say what looked like what,
which thing resembled some other?

Yes, it was a run of white plankton
borne down the Avenue of the Americas
in the stream of the wind,
phosphorescent against the weighty buildings.

Which made the taxi itself,
yellow and slow-moving,
a kind of undersea creature,
I thought as I wiped the fog from the glass,

and me one of its protruding eyes,
an eye on a stem
swiveling this way and that
monitoring one side of its world,
observing tons of water
tons of people
colored signs and lights
and now a wildly blowing race of snow.

The imagery presented in this poem conjures up two previously unrelated worlds, aligns them side by side, and separates them only with a thin barrier of imagination.  Glancing from one line to the next, the reader can be transported from a concrete jungle to an undersea kingdom, just as vibrant and alive.  The flurries of snow make this transition possible.  Through the comparisons to krill and plankton, Collins breathes life into the snowflakes, giving them a direction and a purpose.

Essential for a reader to derive true meaning from the poem is understanding the careful observation and attention to detail by the narrator, necessary to create the imaginary world.   In the third line of the poem, each snowflake is described as “distinguishable.”  This can serve as a metaphor for the city population.  While snowflakes are accepted as individual and unique, normally when the entire sky is filled with them, their individuality is ignored; they are small and indistinguishable from every other.  The same is true of people when thousands of them are walking briskly through Times Square.  It takes as much care and effort to recognize a face in a crowd as it does to recognize and individual snowflake in a blizzard.

The comparisons of the city to the ocean go beyond simple statements of similarity; the author molds the city into his own personal underwater wonderland.  The images he presents, such as the taxi/ undersea creature, are like those dreamed up by a child.  The world he crafts is a paradox, one of attention to detail and youthful simplicity.  The author takes his position as the eye of the creature, observing and interpreting the world he sees for the reader.

In the final line of the poem, Collins describes the snow flurries again, this time not as aquatic beings, but as a race.  This word choice is more literal than his previous selections, but it still gives the snow properties indicative of living beings.  The image is clear, a great swarm of flakes taking the city by storm as would runners in a marathon.