I don't know exactly when I first read this poem, but I remember how it occurred. It was many years ago, back in the pre-internet days (yes Virginia,. there was a time when there was no internet) and I was in a small bookstore (yes Virginia, there was a time when there were small bookstores, with no coffee shop, no place to sit down . . . well you get the picture) looking for Hilaire Belloc's book The Servile State.

At the time, I did not know that Belloc had even written poetry, which is ironic, since he was then and is today much more widely known for his poetry than for his political writings. Anyway, the store didn't have The Servile State, but it did have a book of Belloc's poems, which contained, along with a host of other delightful "versus for children," Sarah Byng.

I liked the poem immediately because it reinforced a prejudice that I have had since I was a small child, namely that reading proffers practical, real-time benefits to the reader. And there it was. Stupid little Sarah Byng should have learned to read. Of course!

Some years later, I had a similar feeling when I first read T.S. Eliot's East Coker, in which Eliot describes writing thus:

. . . So here I am, in the middle way . . .
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling . . .

Even the great T.S. Eliot had trouble writing. Of course!

Anyway, Belloc wrote a lot of fun, light poetry, including Sarah Byng. He also wrote a lot of other good stuff, including The Servile State. He was a poet, novelist, biographer, historian and travel-writer. He was a friend of Chesterton. He was a conservative, devout Catholic, who sparred intellectually with H.G. Wells. He was a Member of Parliament. He was prescient about many things, including the dangers to Western society that were to arise from fundamentalist Islam. But enough that. He wrote some fun poems. Here's one of them.