A bird in a library is an odd sight, and the poem asks us to accept it without explanation: "wren in the library." There is no verb and no scene-setting. A small bird is simply placed among the shelves, and the rest of the poem tries to work out what she is doing there. Its answer, such as it is, comes in fragments. The sentences are unfinished and the grammar is loose, so the reader has to do some of the work, which suits a poem about reading.
The second line, "a luster of lost time to her," can be read at least two ways. Perhaps the library looks to the wren like a place where time has been stored and polished, with old paper and worn bindings giving off a sheen. Or perhaps the wren herself is that luster, a bright, living thing in a room of the past. The phrase "lost time" may recall Proust's famous title about recovering the past, though the poem never says so. Either way, "luster" is a rich word for a poem this spare. It suggests both brightness and the soft shine of something handled for a long time. The repeated *l* sounds in "luster" and "lost" make the line glide, and "to her" then ends it with a small, private gesture. This is the wren's experience, not ours.
Then the poem turns on a comparison: "as foolish as a lord / for the beggar's." The sentence breaks off at the stanza gap, and the possessive "beggar's" waits for a noun. When the next stanza arrives, it supplies one of a kind: "nowhere else to read / and to be." So the beggar's *nowhere else* is what the foolish lord is envying, or at least imitating. The image is a paradox. A lord has every choice, and a beggar has none. The poem suggests there is something enviable in having no alternative, because it takes away the restlessness of choosing. "Foolish for" also has a second sense. To be foolish *for* someone is to be besotted, so the lord is not only silly but smitten. The poem leaves open who is who. The wren might be the beggar, with no other shelter. The speaker might be the lord, foolishly wanting a library as the only place to be. Or the two might blur.
The structure supports this ambiguity. The poem is three couplets, and each pair of lines is a unit that doesn't quite finish its thought. There is no rhyme, no capital letters, and no punctuation apart from the apostrophe in "beggar's," so the poem moves like thought rather than like an announcement. The lines are short and mostly plain words, with only "luster" and "foolish" rising above the everyday. The rhythm is uneven, with two or three strong beats a line, and it slows at the end. The last line, "and to be," is the shortest and has no punctuation. The sentence ends on a bare infinitive, as if existence were the final thing the library offers. The pairing of "read" and "be" is the poem's central claim, that for some creatures, and some people, reading is not a pastime but a way of being alive. The phrase "to be" is hard to hear without thinking of Hamlet, but here it carries no dread. It sounds almost like relief.
What makes the poem worth studying is how much it does with so little. It turns a tiny, unlikely scene into a statement about need and freedom. It reverses an expected social order, since the beggar's lack becomes something a lord might covet. It also shows that poetry can work by leaving gaps. The dangling "beggar's," the unexplained wren, and the unclear "her" all invite the reader in. A reader who stops to supply the missing pieces ends up doing what the wren does, which is to linger in a quiet room, making meaning out of what is on offer, with nowhere else to be.