NATIONAL POETRY DAY 2013

It's National Poetry Day today, and here's something to mark it from Hugh MacDiarmid:

The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part.
Only the little white rose of Scotland.
That smells sharp and sweet - and breaks the heart.
 

...and in the spirit of things, a short and sweet 'Sport and Physical Activity Contribution'...

I play the game I play it smart,
All my effort comes from the heart,
I use my head, I use my feet,
cause I'm a Knox athlete.

...followed by a demonstration of literacy across the curiculum with a maths poem!

A Week in the Life of a Mathematician

'Twas on a Monday morning I had a bright idea,
I was lying in the bath tub and the strategy seemed clear,
For a problem posed by Erdös back in nineteen forty nine,
On sequences dilated into subsets of the line

'Twas on a Tuesday morning I jotted down my thoughts,
I covered backs of envelopes with surds and aleph noughts.
After several cups of coffee I began to feel inspired,
And a lengthy calculation gave the answer I desired.

'Twas on a Wednesday morning I wrote the details out.
My lemmas and corollaries left little room for doubt.
I filled up many pages just to get the logic right,
And with epsilons and deltas I made it watertight.

'Twas on a Thursday morning I typed the paper up,
With "slash subset" and "slash mapsto" to say nothing of "slash cup".
My LaTeXing was perfect, printed out it looked so good,
Should I send it to the Annals? I rather thought I would!

'Twas on a Friday morning I read the paper through,
I checked out every detail as good authors ought to do.
At the bottom of page twenty in an integral I found,
I'd divided through by zero and the proof crashed to the ground.

On Saturday and Sunday I was too depressed to care,
So 'twas on a Monday morning that I had my next idea.

(This poem appeared in The London Mathematical Society Newsletter, September 2009)

 

...and finally a Robert Louis Stevenson  from the collection "A Child's Garden of Verses"...
 
Escape At Bedtime
 
The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars.
There ne'er were such such thousands of leaves on a tree,
Nor of people in church or the Park,
As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,
And that glittered and winked in the dark.
 
The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall
Would be half full of water and stars.
They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,
And they soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head."