Most poems about friendship simply celebrate it. Balachandran V's "A Library of Love", dated Kottayam, 28 July 2005, begins by cross-examining it. For the first five stanzas the speaker asks question after question. Was it "the comfort in each other's being"? Was it "regard, respect, the reason"? The repeated openings, "Was it", "Weren't there", "What", give these stanzas a restless, almost courtroom rhythm, as though the speaker is hunting for the cause of something that won't be pinned down. Each answer on offer, from "joy, the warmth and mirth" to "the glow in our eyes", is lovely, and none is enough.
The poem is honest about what it cannot explain. In stanza five the usual reasons, "the love for music", "mountains", "the interests same", are dismissed with one small word: "just". What replaces them is deliberately vague: "Something did happen when we met... Something right did fall in place." The repeated "Something" admits that the friendship has no neat origin. The image that follows, "A seed, a bond that then grew in time", describes growth rather than cause, which is perhaps the only honest answer available. The speaker also doesn't pretend the friendship was flawless. "Weren't there moments when we flew apart?" is a small admission, and it makes the later warmth more believable.
Once the questioning runs out, the style changes. Stanza seven breaks into short exclamatory fragments: "The rides on bikes! The walks on hills!", "Numbing cold! Gasping breath!" The line breaks are as breathless as the experience they describe. Stanza eight arranges memory into pairs of opposites: dusk and dawn, "green clad forests, snowy peaks", "chaotic cities and villages calm". The inverted last phrase, with the adjective after the noun, gives the list a slightly old-fashioned lilt. Together the pairs suggest a friendship that has travelled through every extreme and stayed intact. Even the "warm drink in hand" in stanza seven turns out to be doing quiet work, because it returns, transformed, in "we have filled each other's cup".
Stanza nine is the emotional hinge: "Lord! How short, how short was it all!" The doubled "short" is one of several repetitions that do the work rhyme might do elsewhere. The poem has no regular end-rhyme, only faint echoes like "trod" and "Lord". Its twelve quatrains read like speech, loosely paced and sometimes awkwardly inverted ("Why to each other did we take"). That plainness suits a poem that trusts feeling over polish. The questions return here too, but they have changed: "How much further would we have / To walk on, think on, side by side?" The speaker no longer puzzles over why the friendship began and instead mourns that it must pause.
The most telling shift is grammatical. The poem opens with "My friend", singular, and from stanza ten becomes "My friends!" The one companion widens into a group. The line "Each of you were what I weren't" bends standard grammar, but its paradox is clear. The friends complete the speaker, and the speaker in turn lives in them: "each of you had a little of me". That exchange explains why leaving "would not matter" much. Nothing essential travels away, because it has already been shared out.
Only in the last line does the title arrive, and the simile feels earned: "Like my books you are / Always kept within my view." A library is built by choice, and no two volumes are the same. Books also don't need to be open to be present, only "just within reach". Judging by the imagery, distance doesn't end these friendships, because they live on in memory and are always at hand.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to explain friendship while still honouring it. It moves from questions, through memories, to a single homely metaphor, and that movement mirrors how many of us come to understand the people we love. We stop asking why, then count what they gave us, and finally find somewhere to keep them.