Explication of "My Number" and "I had heard it's a fight"

    Both “My Number” by Billy Collins and “I had heard it’s a fight”  by Edwin Denby share the idea of death but discuss the meaning of death differently. Collins’ poem shows a man paralyzed with when death will catch up with him. He constantly wonders when and where death will appear again and if it will be his turn. There is this sense of distinct paranoia when the narrator asks where death is lurking and it is interesting how both two lined stanzas are questioning when it is his turn or which “number” supposedly he is. He wonders if death is too busy to come to his doorstep because it is tending to other unfortunate people and their demises. He even asks who he is talking to if they needed to ask for directions to his home as if for security, then follows up that question with “I start talking my way out of this”.

Denby’s poem’s experience/meaning of death was not a man constantly waiting and worrying about death but is actually recalling what dying felt like or the attitude towards dying. He describes the act of dying almost like recalling a memory. He recalls each punch and each sting in every part of his body that was touched. He even uses imagery to describe what it feels like to fight for your life back from the hands of death, “in agony you clutch at a straw, you rattle, and that will fix you”. What is different in this poem than Collin’s poem is that Denby’s narrator sounds more intrigued by what has happened to him and what it really meant. Collin’s narrator focused on when death would come for him and who is dying at the moment and has a more apprehensive meaning of death, whereas Denby’s narrator is more accepting of death and dying and talks about the quick sensation of dying almost as if he never felt more alive in that moment. Though the idea is virtually the same, the meaning of death is different for the narrators which could symbolize that people will always have a different meaning of what death means to them and there is no wrong or right way necessarily to find whatever that meaning is.