Summary
There were a few dozen cows in the field across the road from where the speaker lived. The speaker observed the cows stepping around tufts of grass in the field and putting their big heads down toward the soft grass to feed. At other times, the speaker passed by his window and observed that the field was empty and the cows were gone.
Analysis
The first stanza utilizes selective, concrete details to introduce the reader to the poem’s subject matter. While the poem’s title (“Afternoon with Irish Cows”) indicates that the first stanza will discuss cows, the stanza itself does not explicitly identify the cows. Instead, Collins uses evocative details to describe the cows without naming them—the speaker sees glimpses of their “big heads” and the “soft grass” where they roam. The speaker sees the cows through his windows, so these details realistically capture the speaker's brief, sporadic views of the cows as he goes about his day. These concrete descriptions foreshadow the poem’s focus on the cow’s behaviors and introduce the reader to the subject matter.
The first stanza also establishes the poem’s focus on the relationship between humanity and nature. The cows “occupied” the field just as the speaker occupies a home across the road from the cows; these parallel descriptions unite the speaker and the cows together as metaphorical neighbors. The first two lines portray the speaker and the cow as neighbors living harmoniously, but separately, near each other. The use of the pronoun “we”—“across the road from where we lived”—heightens this sense of separation, as both the cows and the humans are in discrete, plural groups. The fact that the humans and cows are separated by both a road and a window—two man-made, artificial barriers—further contributes to the sense of distance between the speaker and the cows and the speaker's intrigue with the cows.
The stanza also utilizes metaphor when it states that the cows had disappeared “as if they had taken wing.” This metaphor complicates the speaker's description of the cows by comparing them to another animal. It thus expands the poem’s insight from the cows specifically to nature more broadly. This metaphor also adds a sense of irony to the first stanza, which had focused on the cow’s permanence (they step around the field “all day”). The imagery of cows flying away is also unexpected and adds subtle humor to the first stanza.
