alluring, luminous. The other is dusk,

walled with pressed pages, old books

with leathery breath and freckled leaves.

What stays is not the book alone

but where you took it down,

how it felt in your hands,

how she wrapped it in brown paper,

how you carried it home,

how it holds wild seas

that knock the earth apart,

how words burn, freeze,

to break and heal your heart.

Gillian Clarke

Sonnet XXXI

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!

Give back my book and take my kiss instead.

Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,

‘What a big book for such a little head!’

Come, I will show you now my newest hat,

And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!

Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.

I never again shall tell you what I think.

I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;

You will not catch me reading any more:

I shall be called a wife to pattern by;

And some day when you knock and push the door,

Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,

I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

Edna St Vincent Millay

from Aurora Leigh

Books, books, books!

I had found the secret of a garret-room

Piled high with cases in my father’s name;

Piled high, packed large, – where, creeping in and out

Among the giant fossils of my past,

Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs

Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there

At this or that box, pulling through the gap,

In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,

The first book first. And how I felt it beat

Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,

An hour before the sun would let me read!

My books! At last, because the time was ripe,

I chanced upon the poets.

As the earth

Plunges in fury, when the internal fires

Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat

The marts and temples, the triumphal gates

And towers of observation, clears herself

To elemental freedom – thus, my soul,

At poetry’s divine first finger touch,

Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,

Convicted of the great eternities

Before two worlds.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Books

after Larkin

If I were called in

to construct a religion

I should make use of books.

Going to church

would entail a bracing traipse

through make-believe woods.

My liturgy would employ

a splendour of lamplight

and the hush-hush of pages at dusk.

And I should be the old

factotum of books,

bent to the beautiful spines

and mouthing the words like a moth.

Katharine Towers

Poem

In the earnest path of duty,

With the high hopes and hearts sincere,

We, to useful lives aspiring,

Daily meet to labor here.

No vain dreams of earthly glory

Urge us onward to explore

Far-extending realms of knowledge,

With their rich and varied store;

But, with hope of aiding others,

Gladly we perform our part;