The Books he reads are Kindling²
Books must be read as Deliberately
And Reservedly as they are Written³
Books, rather than Mouldering behind an Iron
Grating, far from Inquisitive Gazes, should be
Worn under the Eyes of a great many Readers⁴
We get no good by Calculating Profits from a
Book: so much help with so much reading – it
Is rather when we Gloriously Forget Ourselves
And plunge Soul-Forward, headlong into a book’s
Profound, impassioned for its beauty and salt of
Truth – ‘tis then we get Right Good from books⁵
A Book isn’t made of Sentences laid end to end,
But of sentences built into Arcades or Domes⁶
A Marvelous Book reveals countless Secrets,
Alleviates Pain & Fear, Dissolves Doubts⁷
There is no Frigate like a Book to take
Us lands away – nor any Courser
Like a page of Prancing Poetry⁸
We place around us our Books
To Form ourselves a Home⁹
Our Wealth of Books: the
Drifted Relics of all time¹⁰
¹ Mahmoud Darwish tr. Denys Johnson-Davies, Psalm 2
² Eliot Schain, Disciple
³ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
⁴ Jules Verne tr. Robert Baldick, Journey to the Center of the Earth
⁵ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
⁶ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
⁷ Primo Levi tr. Ruth Feldman & Brian Swann, Unfinished Business
⁸ Emily Dickinson, There is No Frigate
⁹ Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
¹⁰ George Eliot, Middlemarch