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Repetition
Driftless, sitting in my study, reading
Spines of books which once were poorly pleading
To be known—now known—have got me mealing
On a thread, through centuries, now leading.
I, the Iliad’s Unknown Reader, laid it
Horizontal, strident verséd, weighed it
Then alongside Shakespeare, pithy stated,
On the shelf upright, perhaps to grade it.
Soon comes Pound to bring us back to singing;
Soon my email, and my doorbell ringing.
Words and sounds, a street-side car is banging
Odes to love and hymns of hate, unclinging.
Is it nothing but a pointless ranking
Of our moment in a cycle cranking
Endlessly? Or does a larger spanning
Wheel contain a nuance worth our thanking?
Repeat.
Spines of books which once were poorly pleading
To be known—now known—have got me mealing
On a thread, through centuries, now leading.
I, the Iliad’s Unknown Reader, laid it
Horizontal, strident verséd, weighed it
Then alongside Shakespeare, pithy stated,
On the shelf upright, perhaps to grade it.
Soon comes Pound to bring us back to singing;
Soon my email, and my doorbell ringing.
Words and sounds, a street-side car is banging
Odes to love and hymns of hate, unclinging.
Is it nothing but a pointless ranking
Of our moment in a cycle cranking
Endlessly? Or does a larger spanning
Wheel contain a nuance worth our thanking?
Repeat.
The rhymes mostly work, but the meter gets hammered out of shape in a few places. I like the mood this strikes, and as far as I can tell, the speaker enjoys reading but gets interrupted. The only specific interruption mentioned is music from passing cars, though it's not clear whether the speaker dislikes all the music. It had a similar feel to me as "The Raven," though it's structured differently.