I love collecting stationery. And recently I’ve also begun collecting poems about stationery.

Poets not infrequently mention the instruments of their trade – Byron’s praise of his “grey goose-quill” springs to mind, or Sidney “biting [his] truant pen” – but I’ve tried to concentrate my collation on poems that have stationery items as their central theme.

Not to be confused with stationary poems, or even station poems, which are also tempting subjects in themselves.

Proem by Robert Louis Stevenson

Unlike the common run of men,
I wield a double power to please,
And use the GRAVER and the PEN
With equal aptitude and ease.

I move with that illustrious crew,
The ambidextrous Kings of Art;
And every mortal thing I do
Brings ringing money in the mart.

Hence, in the morning hour, the mead,
The forest and the stream perceive
Me wandering as the muses lead—
Or back returning in the eve.

Two muses like two maiden aunts,
The engraving and the singing muse,
Follow, through all my favourite haunts,
My devious traces in the dews.

To guide and cheer me, each attends;
Each speeds my rapid task along;
One to my cuts her ardour lends,
One breathes her magic in my song.

Such crowing self-commendation and confidence in the art(s) as is found in Robert Louis Stevenson’s youthful (and hilarious, and accomplished) Moral Emblems is as delightful as it is rare.

More often, poets (and writers) seem to direct their attention to the materiality of their pen and paper in moments of doubt, hesitation, and dissatisfaction.

The same theme of permanence and erasure as in ‘Pencil’, is taken up in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 122 (which I noted down when I was researching commonplaces), though his instrument is a wax tablet and stylus.

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character’d with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain,
Beyond all date, even to eternity:
Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to raz’d oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss’d.
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score;
Therefore to give them from me was I bold,
To trust those tables that receive thee more:
To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me.

Often, as in Mary Coleridge’s poem, there’s a sense that the writing is inherent in the instrument itself…

The Contents of an Ink-Bottle by Mary E. Coleridge

Well of blackness, all defiling,
Full of flattery and reviling,
Ah, what mischief hast thou wrought
Out of what was airy thought,
What beginnings and what ends,
Making and dividing friends!

Colours of the rainbow lie
In thy tint of ebony;
Many a fancy have I found
Bright upon that sombre ground;
Cupid plays along the edge,
Skimming o’er it like a midge;
Niobe in turn appears,
Thinning it with crystal tears.

False abuse and falser praise,
Falsest lays and roundelays!
One thing, one alone, I think,
Never yet was found in ink; —
Truth lies not, the truth to tell,
At the bottom of this well!

This poem by William Stafford recalls the appearance of the parallel marks left on the page by the splayed tines of a dry nib — called “railroading”.

The need is supplied by one of the characters in Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced, reinterpreting Tennyson’s Maud:

And finally, a poem that echoes the cry of all insatiable stationery lovers:

CACOËTHES SCRIBENDI by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

If all the trees in all the woods were men,
And each and every blade of grass a pen;
If every leaf on every shrub and tree
Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea
Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes
Had nothing else to do but act as scribes,
And for ten thousand ages, day and night,
The human race should write, and write, and write,
Till all the pens and paper were used up,
And the huge inkstand was an empty cup,
Still would the scribblers clustered round its brim
Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink.