Lies Martha Collins Analysis

Lies by Martha Collins

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Martha Collins is an American poet who has published numerous volumes of poetry in her lifetime. Attending undergraduate at Stanford and graduate school at the University of Iowa, Collins is now the editor for Oberlin College Press and editor-at-large for Field magazine. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lies

Anyone can get it wrong, laying low
when she ought to lie, but is it a lie
for her to say she laid him when we know
he wouldn’t lie still long enough to let
her do it? A good lay is not a song,
not anymore; a good lie is something
else: lyrics, lines, what if you say dear sister
when you have no sister, what if you say guns
when you saw no guns, though you know
they’re there? She laid down her arms; she lay
down, her arms by her sides. If we don’t know,
do we lie if we say? If we don’t say, do we lie
down on the job? To arms! in any case,
dear friends. If we must lie, let’s not lie around.

In this poem Martha Collins uses language and word play to present an abstract idea to her audience. Throughout the poem Collins uses different uses of the words "lie," "arms," and "lay" to challenge her audience to think. The word "lie" is used both as the verb form in telling non-truths and the verb form for sexual encounters. She uses the different uses of the word "lie" to question what lying really consists of, asking whether it is a lie to say something we do not know definitively. Next Collins uses the word "arms" to further analyze her original question about lying. Is it lying to say you saw something you know is there even if you don't see it? At first Collins indicates this may be true, but then switches viewpoints and asks whether omitting something you know but cannot prove is also dishonest? Here it seems that Collins is almost asking her audience for their opinion, keeping her audience both involved and thinking. The final line is an attempt to answer her own question, in which she says we must trust ourselves and our judgment. If there is something we believe to be true and it turns out not to be true, in a sense that type of lie may be less harmful to the situation than nothing being said at all for fear of being proven wrong. In other words, any form of communication done with the right intention is better than no communication at all.

I appreciated the way this poem used language to make me think rather than just read. I was forced to read this three times before I better understood what it was asking and how it tried to answer this question.