Theme Reflection: "I subtracted myself from our combination"

Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the United States, bends toward satire in his work. His poem "Sonnet" pokes fun at the conventions of the sonnet form and its constrictions, and "Introduction to Poetry" targets students' unwillingness to discover a poem, rather "wanting to tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it." His heartbreaking poem "Weighing the Dog" is a work of a different cast, rather than taking the subject of poetry itself and creating a parody for a reader's approach, it takes the mundane topic of weighing a dog on a bathroom scale and transforms it into a commentary on lost love. In this way, Collins does an about-face, beginning with an awkward clownish moment and ending with a lament. The reversal comes in the third stanza, when the speaker subtracts the weight of himself from the combined weight of him and his dog. In doing so, he finds a parallel, addressing his lost love and telling her that he "never figured out what you amounted to / until I subtracted myself from our combination." This realization takes the speaker off-guard, and similarly surprises the reader. In just three lines, the experience has utterly transformed into a poignant story of loss-- "now we are both lost in strange and distant neighborhoods," alone, with no one to stand with on the scale.