Picnic Lightning By Billy Collins Summary
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“Picnic, Lightning” by Billy Collins is a poem that is composed of five stanzas containing six sentences and has 40 lines that run into each other. This structure highlights the simplicity of the piece as well as Billy Collins’ uniquely simplistic writing style. “Picnic, Lightning” focuses on death being as much a part nature as life, and inexorable to everyone. Death has many uncontrollable factors from when where and even how you die. And it is because of this realization that death is everywhere, that we must also realize life is a precious gift that cannot be taken for grant it.
People die from circumstances beyond one’s control. Collins starts his poem by juxtaposing being “struck by a meteor/ … while reading in a chair at home,” (1-3)