Poetry Monday

Change the narrator's gender and this poem is Me!

Book Lover

Robert Service






I keep collecting books I know


I'll never, never read;


My wife and daughter tell me so,


And yet I never heed.


"Please make me," says some wistful tome,


"A wee bit of yourself."


And so I take my treasure home,


And tuck it in a shelf.






And now my very shelves complain;


They jam and over-spill.


They say: "Why don't you ease our strain?"


"some day," I say, "I will."


So book by book they plead and sigh;


I pick and dip and scan;


Then put them back, distrest that I


Am such a busy man.






Now, there's my Boswell and my Sterne,


my Gibbon and Defoe;


To savour Swift I'll never learn,


Montaigne I may not know.


On Bacon I will never sup,


For Shakespeare I've no time;


Because I'm busy making up


These jingly bits of rhyme.






Chekov is caviare to me,


While Stendhal makes me snore;


Poor Proust is not my cup of tea,


And Balzac is a bore.


I have their books, I love their names,


And yet alas! they head,


With Lawrence, Joyce and Henry James,


My Roster of Unread.






I think it would be very well


If I commit a crime,


And get put in a prison cell


And not allowed to rhyme;


Yet given all these worthy books


According to my need,


I now caress with loving looks,


But never, never read.