Hilaire Belloc's "On the Gift of a Book to a Child"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2024

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is a series of increasingly vital pleas. Happy reading.

For more of Belloc’s advice to the young, find yourself a copy of Cautionary Tales for Children!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, May 27th, 2004.
0:09.7	Today's poem is by Hillare Belloc, and it's called On the Gift of a Book to a Child.
0:17.7	This poem hits home for me on a number of levels, first because it is the end of the academic year,
0:26.0	and that means that I'm in a book gift-giving mode.
0:33.2	Who am I kidding?
0:33.9	I pretty much always give books as gifts.
0:38.0	If you have received a gift to me that is not a book, consider yourself rare.
0:43.8	Although maybe consider it an insult because maybe I just think that you wouldn't enjoy a book.
0:48.4	Who doesn't enjoy a book?
0:50.8	I digress.
0:52.4	But at this time of year, I'm particularly in the mode and mindset of giving books as gifts to graduates.
1:00.8	And the summertime, for me, a teacher means that I might have fewer responsibilities and a little more leisure and might often think about giving myself a few
1:14.9	books as gifts because I might actually have time to read them, God willing. But at home,
1:24.3	I also have five children, the youngest of whom is still very small, and it is a daily
1:33.4	battle to keep my own personal books safe. It's not a day goes by that I don't find some book that has been
1:42.8	illicitly pull off the shelf and manhandled
1:45.5	by a one-year-old. And even the extra sturdy cardboard books that are blissily manhandled by that
1:54.8	one-year-old are often found in pieces or various states of disrepair around the house.
2:03.3	So I have all sorts of reasons to worry for the safety and treatment of books.
2:11.4	Whatever stage of book worry or book gift giving you might be in,
2:16.6	hopefully you will find something to sympathize with or
2:20.0	identify with, or at least enjoy in Belloc's poem. Here is on the gift of a book to a child.
	...

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