Shel Silverstein

God's Wheel

God's Wheel - meaning Summary

Responsibility Exceeds Desire

A speaker is invited by God to take over the world for a while and answers flippantly with practical, self-centered questions about setting, pay, lunch and quitting. The casual tone reveals immaturity and a lack of grasp of responsibility, prompting God to take the wheel back. The poem compresses a lesson about limits, authority and the consequences of treating power as a game, using wit and irony to make its point.

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God says to me with a kind of smile, "Hey how would you like to be God awhile And steer the world?" "Okay," says I, "I'll give it a try. Where do I set? How much do I get? What time is lunch? When can I quit?" "Gimme back that wheel," says God. "I don't think you're quite ready yet."

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