Buffalo Bill - Analysis

A legend dropped into the word defunct

The poem’s central move is brutal in its simplicity: it takes a famous American showman and collapses him from myth into a fact of mortality. The first lines name Buffalo Bill’s and then immediately tag him as defunct, a word that sounds official, almost clinical, as if the legend has been reduced to a file entry. Against the glamour of a public figure, the poem insists on the one status no celebrity outlives. The tone begins curt and faintly mocking, as though the speaker is allergic to the usual reverence.

Yet the poem doesn’t stay cold. It quickly begins to reanimate the old spectacle with vivid, almost boyish energy: he used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion. That compound phrase polishes the horse into something unreal, as if it’s made of light and speed rather than muscle. The poem lets us feel why the myth existed in the first place.

The show: speed, ease, and the violence you’re meant to applaud

Cummings recreates Buffalo Bill’s act as a kind of verbal performance: he could break onetwothreefourfive pigeons justlikethat. The birds are not quite alive in the line; they’re turned into countable targets, a quick sequence, a trick. Even the word break is telling: it suggests both shattering and breaking a record, as if killing and entertainment have merged into the same gesture.

There’s a tension here between admiration and accusation. The speaker can’t deny the ease of the feat, the charisma of a man who could make violence look like elegance. But by making the pigeons a breathless number string, the poem also exposes how a crowd is trained to experience harm as rhythm.

The hinge: Jesus as awe and as recoil

The poem turns sharply on the single word Jesus. It reads like an involuntary exclamation, the kind you blurt out when you’re impressed and disturbed at once. That’s the hinge where the speaker’s voice becomes more openly human: not just reporting an act, but feeling the shock of it—maybe even shame at being impressed.

Immediately after, the poem offers what sounds like a simple compliment: he was a handsome man. But in this context, handsome isn’t innocent. It’s part of the machinery that makes a killer into a star: attractiveness smooths over blood, just as watersmooth-silver smooths the horse into a surface. The poem lets us hear how easily charm becomes a moral anesthetic.

The question that won’t behave: what I want to know

When the speaker says and what I want to know is, the poem pivots from description to confrontation. The line sounds almost conversational, but it’s also a setup for judgment. Instead of asking about Buffalo Bill’s life, the speaker asks about his death—about how death receives him.

The key phrase your blue-eyed boy carries a sharp American charge. Blue-eyed suggests innocence, favoredness, the kind of all-American glow that can protect a person from scrutiny. Calling him boy also shrinks him, refusing the grand adult title the legend would demand. The poem holds two ideas in conflict: this man was powerful enough to command the arena, and yet he is small in the face of what comes next.

Mister Death: respect, sarcasm, and the final equality

The last address, Mister Death, is where the poem’s irony becomes most concentrated. The word Mister sounds polite, even deferential, but it’s also faintly sarcastic, like tipping your hat to the one authority who can’t be bribed by fame. The speaker’s question—how do you like him—suggests that death is an audience member too, watching the show and then closing the curtain.

That ending intensifies the poem’s central contradiction: Buffalo Bill’s whole identity is built on being watched, on being handsome and spectacular, on making time look like onetwothreefourfive. But death is a spectator who doesn’t clap. The legend depended on an admiring crowd; the poem imagines the one viewer who cannot be impressed.

The uneasy dare beneath the elegy

Read one way, the poem mourns a dazzling performer. Read another way, it dares the reader to notice what they were dazzled by. If the act was killing pigeons justlikethat, and the man was loved for it, what exactly is the poem asking us to admire—skill, or the culture that calls cruelty a trick? The final question doesn’t only go to Mister Death; it hangs in the air for anyone who ever helped make Buffalo Bill into a myth.