Archive for Poetry

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Euclid Alone Has looked On Beauty Bare

Posted in Euclid, Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on September 25, 2011 by telescoper

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

by Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

4 Comments »

MCMXIV

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on August 29, 2011 by telescoper

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats’ restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word–the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

by Philip Larkin (1922-1985).

I came across this while searching for a poem to post on an August Bank Holiday  (because today is one of those). I hadn’t expect to find something like this though! Larkin isn’t known as a war poet, but I find his detachment and use of irony in this poem- e.g. comparing the lines of men in the trenches to those queuing to watch cricket or football – as devastating as some of the more obviously visceral works of the genre.

Leave a comment »

More Cosmological Haiku

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on August 18, 2011 by telescoper

In view of my current rather hectic schedule – why else would I be up at this ungodly hour? – I thought I’d combine another bit of recycling with some audience participation. I’ve updated below the list of Haiku I posted some time ago with some new ones I’ve jotted down at random intervals over the intervening months.

How about a few Haiku of your own on themes connected to astronomy, cosmology or physics?

Don’t be worried about making the style of your contributions too authentic, just make sure they are 17 syllables in total, and split into three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively.

Here are some of my own to get you started:

Quantum Gravity:
The troublesome double-act
Of Little and Large

Gravity’s waves are
Traceless; which does not mean they
Can never be found

The Big Bang wasn’t
So big, at least not when you
Think in decibels.

Cosmological
Constant and Dark Energy
Are vacuous names

Microwave Background
Photons remember a time
When they were hotter

Isotropic and
Homogeneous metric?
Robertson-Walker

Galaxies evolve
In a complicated way
We don’t understand

Acceleration:
Type Ia Supernovae
Gave us the first clue

Cosmic Inflation
Could have stretched the Universe
And made it flatter

Astrophysicist
Is what I’m told is my Job
Title. Whatever.

“Clusters look cool,”  said
Sunyaev and Zel’dovich,
“because they are hot”.

Gaussianity
is produced by inflation,
normally speaking.

Gravity waves are
a kind of perturbation;
they make you tensor

Bubble collisions
Leave marks in the C-M-B
To please A. Linde

This Haiku contains
“Baryon Oscillations”
in its middle line.

What should we build next:
S-K-A or E-L-T?
Or maybe neither…?

J W* S T,
(the James Webb Space Telescope);
long name, big budget

* “W” has to be pronounced “dubya” for this one to work!

Contributions welcome via the comments box. The best one gets a chance to win Bully’s star prize.

14 Comments »

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on August 12, 2011 by telescoper

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Leave a comment »

Please Fire Me

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on July 22, 2011 by telescoper

Here comes another alpha male,
and all the other alphas
are snorting and pawing,
kicking up puffs of acrid dust

while the silly little hens
clatter back and forth
on quivering claws and raise
a titter about the fuss.

Here comes another alpha male–
a man’s man, a dealmaker,
holds tanks of liquor,
charms them pantsless at lunch:

I’ve never been sicker.
Do I have to stare into his eyes
and sympathize? If I want my job
I do. Well I think I’m through

with the working world,
through with warming eggs
and being Zenlike in my detachment
from all things Ego.

I’d like to go
somewhere else entirely,
and I don’t mean
Europe.

by Deborah Garrison

4 Comments »

The Perils of Modern Living

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on July 15, 2011 by telescoper

Well up above the tropostrata
There is a region stark and stellar
Where, on a streak of anti-matter
Lived Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.

Remote from Fusion’s origin,
He lived unguessed and unawares
With all his antikith and kin,
And kept macassars on his chairs.

One morning, idling by the sea,
He spied a tin of monstrous girth
That bore three letters: A. E. C.
Out stepped a visitor from Earth.

Then, shouting gladly o’er the sands,
Met two who in their alien ways
Were like as lentils. Their right hands
Clasped, and the rest was gamma rays.

by Prof. Harold P. Furth (1930-2002)

Leave a comment »

Feynman on Poetry

Posted in Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on July 6, 2011 by telescoper

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one – million – year – old light. A vast pattern – of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

Richard Feynman (1918-1988)

8 Comments »

After Summer Rain

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on July 6, 2011 by telescoper

All day the rain has filled the apple-trees,
And stilled the orchard grasses of their mirth,
Turning these acres green and silvered seas
That drowned the summer musics of the earth.
Now that this clearer twilight takes the hill,
This thin, belated radiance, moving by,
Bird-calls return, and odours, rainy still,
And colours glinting through the earth and sky.

Here where I watch the robins from the lane,
That pirouette and preen among the leaves,
These swift, wet-winged arrivals in the rain
Have spilled a wisdom from their dripping eaves,–
And beauty still is more than daily bread,
For fevered minds, and hearts discomforted.

by David Morton (1886-1957)

Leave a comment »

For Sidney Bechet

Posted in Jazz, Poetry with tags , , , , on June 26, 2011 by telescoper

Just stumbled across this excellent documentary about the great Sidney Bechet and couldn’t resist posting it alongside the poem by Philip Larkin that follows it, which is called For Sidney Bechet. Watching great jazz musicians play, including the rare clips of Bechet shown in the video, the thought always comes into my mind that if you took the instrument away from them, it would just carry on playing by itself…

That note you hold, narrowing and rising, shakes
Like New Orleans reflected on the water,
And in all ears appropriate falsehood wakes,

Building for some a legendary Quarter
Of balconies, flower-baskets and quadrilles,
Everyone making love and going shares

Oh, play that thing! Mute glorious Storyvilles
Others may license, grouping around their chairs
Sporting-house girls like circus tigers (priced

Far above rubies) to pretend their fads,
While scholars manqués nod around unnoticed
Wrapped up in personnels like old plaids.

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City
Is where your speech alone is understood,

And greeted as the natural noise of good,
Scattering long-haired grief and scored pity.

6 Comments »

Human Life’s Mystery

Posted in Poetry with tags , on May 20, 2011 by telescoper

We sow the glebe, we reap the corn,
We build the house where we may rest,
And then, at moments, suddenly,
We look up to the great wide sky,
Inquiring wherefore we were born…
For earnest or for jest?

The senses folding thick and dark
About the stifled soul within,
We guess diviner things beyond,
And yearn to them with yearning fond;
We strike out blindly to a mark
Believed in, but not seen.

We vibrate to the pant and thrill
Wherewith Eternity has curled
In serpent-twine about God’s seat;
While, freshening upward to His feet,
In gradual growth His full-leaved will
Expands from world to world.

And, in the tumult and excess
Of act and passion under sun,
We sometimes hear-oh, soft and far,
As silver star did touch with star,
The kiss of Peace and Righteousness
Through all things that are done.

God keeps His holy mysteries
Just on the outside of man’s dream;
In diapason slow, we think
To hear their pinions rise and sink,
While they float pure beneath His eyes,
Like swans adown a stream.

Abstractions, are they, from the forms
Of His great beauty?-exaltations
From His great glory?-strong previsions
Of what we shall be?-intuitions
Of what we are-in calms and storms,
Beyond our peace and passions?

Things nameless! which, in passing so,
Do stroke us with a subtle grace.
We say, ‘Who passes?’-they are dumb.
We cannot see them go or come:
Their touches fall soft, cold, as snow
Upon a blind man’s face.

Yet, touching so, they draw above
Our common thoughts to Heaven’s unknown,
Our daily joy and pain advance
To a divine significance,
Our human love-O mortal love,
That light is not its own!

And sometimes horror chills our blood
To be so near such mystic Things,
And we wrap round us for defence
Our purple manners, moods of sense-
As angels from the face of God
Stand hidden in their wings.

And sometimes through life’s heavy swound
We grope for them!-with strangled breath
We stretch our hands abroad and try
To reach them in our agony,-
And widen, so, the broad life-wound
Which soon is large enough for death.

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61)

Share/Bookmark

Leave a comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »