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Slanting Lines
Jump willing into every word-filled well;
a book should suck you into its embrace.
Fall, fall into the writer’s well-cast spell.
That book will take you o’er a stormy fell
with her who to her lover’s side makes haste:
jump willing into every word-filled well.
That book will hold against your ear a shell
whose music makes your languid pulses race:
fall, fall into the writer’s well-cast spell.
That book will set you puzzles which propel
your thoughts, destroy or reconstruct a case:
jump willing into every word-filled well.
That book will tales of distant countries tell
or take you on a voyage through deepest space:
fall, fall into the writer’s well-cast spell.
And now, this book, the here and now dispel
and conjure me to quite a different place.
Jump willing into every word-filled well,
fall, fall into the writer’s well-cast spell.