Dear Reader

William Taylor Collins 1721 (Sussex) – 1759 (Sussex)



Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can't help traveling together.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:07 min read
112

Quick analysis:

Scheme AXXXXX BXXBX BXCXX XBXCXXX XAXXA
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,199
Words 225
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 6, 5, 5, 7, 5

William Taylor Collins

William Collins was an English poet. Second in influence only to Thomas Gray, he was an important poet of the middle decades of the 18th century. more…

All William Taylor Collins poems | William Taylor Collins Books

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    "Dear Reader" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/41715/dear-reader>.

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