Summary
Occasionally, the speaker would open his blue front door and see the field full of cows eating or lying down on the ground resting. When they laid down, the cows were sprawled in various directions and appeared to be waiting for rain. The speaker remarked on the cows’ mysterious qualities and their apparent patience as they waited for the rain. The cows remained silent and rested throughout the afternoon.
Analysis
The second stanza emphasizes the relationship between the cows and their environment. The speaker states that “the field would be full of their munching,” a description which blends the cows’ chewing with the field where they eat. The field itself is “full” just as the cows are full from eating. This description linguistically links the cows with their environment.
The speaker then describes the cows’ sides as “black-and-white maps,” a metaphor that again connects the cows to physical space and location. The metaphor of a map suggests how animals are inextricably linked to the natural environment. Their very bodies are maps of the natural world. By contrast, the speaker feels disconnected from the natural world. At times he does not see the cows, and only when he “would open the blue front door” would he again gain a portal into the cows’ world. The very metaphor that he chooses to describe the cows—a map—imposes the world of humanity and civilization upon the cows’ natural state. A map is a quintessentially manmade object or tool that is used to impose order or meaning upon the natural world. By contrast, as the later stanzas express, the cows are content in their “unadulterated” natural state and do not feel the need to impose such artificial constraints upon their environment or way of being.
This stanza also personifies the cows by ascribing human emotions to them. The speaker states that the cows appear “mysterious,” “patient,” and “dumbfounded,” which are each human states of mind. At the same time, the use of the word “appears” acknowledges that the speaker cannot actually determine the cows’ inner emotional states, but instead speculates about them. Given this situation, the speaker's commentary on the cows is truly more of a commentary on the speaker's internal feelings. Like the cows who appear “dumbfounded”—which means stunned and silent—the speaker himself appears to be intrigued and dumbfounded by the cows and the natural setting.
Collins also uses literary devices to develop the theme of the speaker's close observation of the cows’ integration with their natural environment. The stanza uses enjambment—the continuation of a sentence across multiple lines of poetry—which creates a natural, conversational cadence to the poetry. This enjambment extends across the first five lines of the stanza, ending with the phrase “waiting for rain.” The end of the enjambment here in line twelve places emphasis on the rain and creates an unexpected sense of change and tension in the relaxed stanza. Another prominent literary device here is anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of a sentence or clause. The speaker remarks on “how mysterious,” “how patient and dumbfounded” the cows appear. This repetitive structure mirrors the structure of a chant or song and thus places emphasis on the speaker's profound sense of appreciation and intrigue regarding the cows. Finally, Collins mixes tenses in this stanza to convey a simultaneous sense of immediacy and time passing. While some phrases use the conditional past tense (“I would open the blue front door, / and again the field would be full of their munching”), which creates a sense of repetition, other lines are in the simple present tense (“they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon”). This shifting of tenses subtly destabilizes the stanza and reflects Collins’ simultaneous focus on the cows’ existence more broadly and on the speaker's specific, immediate observations of the cows.
