A child opens a heavy book at random and finds, to her delight, that the book already knows everything. That small scene is the whole of Mary Carolyn Davies's "The Encyclopedia," and its charm comes from how much it manages to say about learning in only eight short lines.
The speaker is plainly young, or at least speaks with a child's directness. The opening claim, "Just anywhere you open this book / It's wiser than a king," is the kind of comparison a child would make, and it is a good one. Kings, in the stories children hear, are the people who have the final word on everything. Yet a king's wisdom depends on his advisers, his moods, his court. The encyclopedia's wisdom is there on any page, waiting, and it asks nothing in return. The phrase "just anywhere" matters here: this is not a book you have to read from the beginning or consult only in emergencies. Its knowledge is everywhere at once, so that opening it is a little like a lucky dip in which every prize is a good one.
The poem then does something clever by showing rather than telling. Having announced that the book "knows everything," it offers a sample: "Marbles, markets, measles, mermaid, / Milkman, miles, and moon." Every word begins with M, and the effect is double. On one level, the list imitates how an encyclopedia is actually organized, since entries sit shoulder to shoulder in alphabetical order, with no regard for how different they are. On another level, the sound itself is a pleasure. The repeated m is soft and hummable, and reading the line aloud, you can almost feel it rolling around in your mouth like a marble. The contents of the list are wonderfully mixed: a toy, a place of trade, a sickness, a creature that does not exist, a man who delivers bottles to the doorstep, a unit of distance, and a heavenly body. The ordinary and the fantastic sit side by side, and the poem treats them as equals. A mermaid gets an entry just as measles does. That flattening is exactly how the world looks to a child, and also, in its way, how an encyclopedia sees it.
The poem's structure supports this lightness. It is built as a single stanza of eight lines, with short, bouncy rhythms that mostly keep to a pattern of alternating longer and shorter lines. The rhymes are simple and satisfying: "king" with "everything," "look" with "book," "moon" with "soon." That last pair is a small joke, since "moon" is the final word of the list and "soon" arrives to deflate the speaker's hopes. The rhymes are the sort a child could almost have invented, which gives the poem its easy, spoken feel.
Then comes the turn. After the playful list, the voice becomes quieter and more honest: "I'd like to be that wise. I'm afraid / I shan't be, though. Not soon!" The exclamation mark is worth noticing. It could have been a sigh, but instead it sounds cheerful, almost cheeky. The speaker admits she is far from knowing everything, yet the word "soon" hides a hope inside the disappointment. Not soon is not never. The wish to be wise is stated plainly, and the poem leaves that wish open rather than closing it off.
This is what gives such a slight poem its lasting appeal. It captures the moment when a child first grasps how big the world of knowledge is, and how far she stands from the middle of it. Many people feel that moment as discouraging. Here it is felt as a mixture of awe and appetite. The book is wiser than a king, the speaker is not, and the gap between them is not a source of shame but an invitation. The poem also takes a book that might seem dry, a thick reference work of facts, and shows that it is full of surprises and music. In a few lines, it makes the case that curiosity is its own kind of treasure, and that wanting to know is where wisdom begins.