A bibliophile is supposed to be someone who loves the past: the cracked spine, the foxed page, the smell of an old shelf. Dave Bonta's "Bibliophile" gives the word a twist in six short lines. For him, books are "people born in the present." The book lover here is not an antiquarian but a midwife, watching something new arrive in the world every time a page is opened.
The poem's logic is a little slippery, and that is part of its charm. It begins "to the rational tongue," and the phrase can be read two ways. It may mean "in plain, sensible language, this is how things are." It may also suggest that this is how books look to the rational tongue, as opposed to some other, more dreamlike way of speaking. The poem never decides, and the ambiguity matters. A book is a printed object, perhaps decades or centuries old, so calling it a newborn is not strictly rational. Yet the line insists on it, as if the claim were obvious. The idea seems to be that a book exists only in the act of being read, and each reader receives it in their own present, so it is born again each time.
The images that follow come in a quick chain, and all of them involve feet. These new arrivals "set foot in the world," a phrase with a faintly nautical flavour, like someone stepping off a boat. They do so "as light as a dancing master." The choice is precise. A dancing master is a teacher, someone with authority and knowledge, yet the comparison stresses weightlessness. So the books bring learning without heaviness, and their wisdom walks on tiptoe. The final couplet then sends the image out to sea: these light-footed arrivals "make better music / than the most dangerous seas." The sea is the traditional emblem of vast, thrilling, life-threatening power, and the poem sets it against something as small and quiet as a book. A book wins on the one ground where it can compete: music. One reading is that the sea's music comes with the threat of drowning, while the book's comes without it. Another is that a book's quiet is the more remarkable sound because it has to be made inside the reader's head.
The construction mirrors this lightness. The poem is three unrhymed couplets and one unbroken sentence, with no punctuation and no capital letters. Nothing interrupts it, so the sentence moves forward as smoothly as the dancer it describes. The first couplet carries the longest line, "books are like people born in the present," which sets out the simile with some deliberation. After that the lines shorten and quicken, as though the poem itself were stepping into the world. Sound does quiet work too. The second and third couplets are full of m and s sounds: "master," "make," "music," "most," "light as," "dangerous seas." The m sounds tie "dancing master" to "music," so the teacher and the sound he makes belong together. The closing line is made of stressed, heavy words, "most," "dangerous," "seas," and it ends on a long hiss like a wave drawing back. The poem ends on the very thing it has just called outdone.
The word that holds everything together is "present." Placed at the end of the poem's longest line, it is the main claim, and everything after it unfolds from it. The poem puts "born" and "present" together and treats the reading of books as an event in time rather than a visit to a museum. That is what makes the poem worth reading. It is short enough to memorize, but it overturns the usual picture of the book lover as a keeper of dead things. It also makes a small argument by example. Its comparisons are strange and slightly illogical, a book to a newborn, a newborn to a dancer, a dancer to music beating the ocean. They work because the reader is willing to follow them, and that willingness is the kind of reading the poem praises.