Cleaving In Billy Collins 'Short Poem Divorce'

Contracted Cleaving: “Divorce”
Intro
In Billy Collins’ short poem “Divorce” (2008), readers get to see a relationship from its intimate moments through to the cold, hardened end. While relationships are often thought of in domestic terms, Collins introduces silverware as personified characters, toying with the notion of domesticity to some extent. Though only four lines, the poem delivers a punchy, compact narrative rife with emotion undertones. The diction initially suggests the potential for a fairytale ending, but these notions are quickly severed as language mirrors the relationship itself. Collins exposes the brutality of a failed marriage that mirrors a kind of capitalized outsourcing of a divorce.

Body
Collins’ use of “Once” (line
Collins uses spoons and forks to describe two separate stages of the relationship (1-2). Typically, spoons and forks are made of metal and are malleable as a result. Much like the temporal language in lines one and two, the use of items that can bend under pressure and even melt under enough heat symbolizes the ways in which individuals might change over time in a relationship. Because the spoons are individuals, they operate independently, even if they come together nicely, fitting and resting in romantic metaphor of “spooning.” However, the spoons face different pressures and uses, different expectations and experiences, which seems to lead to less and less fitting together. This notion is echoed, briefly,by the temporal shift. The poem begins in the past and moves to the present, establishing a precedent for change of some
Collins writes, “Across a granite table” (3). The use of across in this line reveals the gap, the distance between the two people getting divorced. Where they were once nestled together in a comfortable space, they now find themselves at a distance and at odds with one another. The use of the granite table makes this more dramatic because the granite acts in contrast to the bed mentioned in line one. Likewise, taking into account that granite is an igneous rock, the table then embodies the relationship: like granite which begins hot and malleable, the relationship has cooled and hardened into something that lacks its own heat. While it can be polished, the granite is still hard and rough, which reflects the relationship status. Finally, tables can be clinical, impersonal. In this sense, there is no nourishment provided on the table, rendering it a place for dissection in some ways. The hard granite will not be scarred by the cutting away of two lives from one another, like wood