Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, November 14th, 20203.

Today's poem is by Billy Collins, and it's called Dear Reader. Yesterday, we featured a poem by Robert Lou Stevenson to any reader.

And as I was assembling the poems for this week, I thought it would be interesting and enjoyable

to hear a variety of poems addressed to the reader.

This is a time-honored tradition going back many centuries.

One of my favorite addresses to the reader is Ben Johnson's very simple.

Pray thee, take care, that take us my book in hand to read it well.

That is, to understand.

And while some readerly addresses are as simple and straightforward as that, a kind of prayer that the reader would read with charity.

Others are more involved and tend even to reveal the poet's thoughts about the value of poetry or the purpose in reading poetry at all.

And different poets tend to come to different conclusions on that point or those points.

So let's see if we can discern what Billy Collins thinks.

Dear reader,

Bodilayer sees you as his brother,

and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs

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. Dryden makes you feel enclosed in the candle glow of a paneled

library. Leatherbound Ovid and Horace are on their shelves. With Tennyson, you are in a moated garden, and with Yates you lean against

a broken pear tree on a day haunted by clouds. But now you are here with me, with no particular

place to rendezvous beyond the open pasture of this page, no zeitgeist marching in the background. No ethos thrown over our shoulders

like a cape. This is the way we like it, I think. Our contact momentary, accidental as a book by a window

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