Ask any classic poet (providing she isn’t dead) to confess her secret passion and she will most certainly tell you that it’s seeing her timeless work transformed into an amusing verse about modern-day financial issues.

 These are the premises behind Michael Silverstein’s lighthearted book, “Songs of Wall Street: An Anthology of Verse for Literary Investors.” In the book, Silverstein – touted as the “Poet Laureate of Wall Street” – has combined some of the most well-known poetry in history from authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and the Brownings with his own versions featuring an investor’s wit (such as it is). Each classic poem is provided in its entirety in most cases, and the rewritten version is laid out to the right to show the comparison between them.

 While this may seem like a horror of an idea – taking masterpieces of verse and subverting them with a blatantly unfunny subject such as the stock market – Silverstein has somehow managed to make it work.

For one thing, as a literature fan, I found it exhilarating to read the works of Robert Burns, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and even Edgar Allan Poe while sitting at my desk at work. More people should keep classic poetry books at their desks and read them when they need inspiration. This book is ideal for that purpose because it’s not the size of a phone book like most literary anthologies, and its black cloth cover makes it discreet (for those who have unenlightened bosses or coworkers).

Secondly, Silverstein has done a good job of avoiding banality in his rewrites. He doesn’t grasp at the easiest or silliest rhyme just to make it match the original. He seems to have given his poems much thought, and his efforts have paid off in an overall amusing work.
Consider the following experts. The first is from Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”:

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
Woods and steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee bed of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

Now read the first part of Silverstein’s “The Passionate Broker to His Client.”:

Invest with me and be my client,
And we will all the markets troll,
For bargains and appealing yields,
In local stocks and foreign yields.

And we will take a long-term view,
Winning a bunch and losing a few
Heeding the Fed, and Abby Cohen
Knowing we need never go it alone.
And I will balance all thy holdings,
And never burden thee with scoldings;
I’ll wear the dunce cap for thy failings,
Accepting blame for thy derailings.

 Other transformations include Shakespeare’s “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” to “Shall I Declare Thee to the I.R.S.?”, Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” to “Debt’s No Dark Cloud” and Shelley’s “Music, When Soft Voices Die” to “Mergers, That Will Never Fly.”
 Silverstein is the senior editor for Bloomberg Magazine. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, CFO, In Business and Sylvia Porter’s Magazine. He’s also been featured on National Public Radio. In the book’s introduction, Silverstein explains that since the “great poets of times past” did not live to see the booming stock market of recent years, it is his job to celebrate the “extraordinary phenomenon.”

 “The task has fallen to me,” he writes, “a person with a rare combination of versifying skills (though of an admittedly derivative nature) and a knowledge of financial markets gained through labors both exhilarating and painful.”

 Silverstein has achieved what he set out to do, although I wonder how many Wall Street moguls really look forward to curling up with the works of Byron or Longfellow after a long day on the trading floor. “Songs of Wall Street” probably works best as a gift, something cute and funny to read with others. As a banking and finance writer, it’s particularly close to my heart because it combines the brilliance of great literature with the tedium of stocks and the humor that Wall Street is so desperately lacking.
 Kari Lomanno  works for Inside Business, a weekly business journal in Virginia.