Eugene Field's poem begins like a sincere plea for moral rescue and ends as a shopping list. A speaker kneels and asks to be kept "in wisdom's way," then slips, stanza by stanza, into begging for exactly the thing he claims to fear. The joke is that the sin in question is book collecting. The central idea is that obsession can borrow the language of devotion and still serve only itself.
The opening is carefully straight-faced. "Keep me, I pray" could belong to any hymn, and the second line promises a search for "truths eternal." The comedy arrives in the fourth line: "My purse is light, my flesh is weak." This echoes the familiar scriptural phrasing about weak flesh, but the purse comes first, as if the speaker's real worry is money. In the second stanza the "baleful appetites" and "Satan's fascinating art" sound truly dangerous until the list lands on "first editions, and of prints." The word "fascinating" nicely holds both meanings, bewitching and merely interesting. The build-up to Satan and the drop to catalogue items is a small anticlimax, and it does most of the poem's work.
The third stanza turns the pun into a plan. The speaker wants a "godly walk" away from "bookish strife," a phrase that suggests collectors competing over the same prize. Then comes the wittiest line in the poem: he hopes to "extra-illustrate my life." Extra-illustrating, as I read the term, means adding prints and pictures to a book. Here piety becomes decoration, a holy life as a volume to be embellished with good deeds. Even his virtue is imagined in bibliophile terms.
The turn comes with "But if, O Lord, it pleaseth Thee." The old-fashioned courtesy of "pleaseth" is a negotiator's politeness. If he must be tempted, he asks to be "Most notably beset," a phrase that sounds like a besieged city, though this is a siege he wants to lose. The prayer then names its price: "Let my temptation be a book." The next lines reveal that the vice runs deeper than love of reading. He wants to "purchase, hold, and keep" the book, and the real pleasure is that other men will "wail to know I got it cheap." Covetousness is the sin here, along with pride and a dash of schadenfreude. The speaker wants an audience for his bargain.
The final stanza is a burst of collectors' vocabulary: "rare copperplates," "Large paper," "Uncut." Each phrase points to rarity or fine condition. The last line, "Uncut, unique, unknown to Lowndes," piles up the u-sounds like a bidder raising the price. Lowndes, judging by the context, must be a reference authority collectors would consult, so the ultimate dream is a book that even the standard guide has missed. The pleasure of possessing something no authority has recorded is the real "fascinating art" of the poem.
The form supports the joke. Six quatrains in rhymed ABAB pattern, running in smooth, mostly iambic lines of four beats, give it the steady cadence of a hymn. Rhymes like "way/to-day" and "heart/art" are neat and expected, which keeps the tone solemn while the content goes astray. The one slightly stretched rhyme, "abounds" with "Lowndes," comes at the very end, as if the speaker's enthusiasm finally bends the meter's good manners. Small touches such as the spaced contraction "They 'll" keep the voice conversational beneath the formal diction.
What makes the poem worth reading is how gently it laughs at its speaker, and perhaps at anyone with a consuming hobby. The speaker is no villain, and he is oddly honest, since he never pretends to want holiness more than the book. Anyone who has bargained with their own conscience over one more purchase will recognise the move. The poem also shows how much comedy can come from a mismatch of register, the vocabulary of prayer applied to the stock of a bookshop. Its last wish is a book that no one else has found, and the humor is that the speaker has called it a temptation while hoping hard to receive it.