Epistomology
Richard Wilbur
I.
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.
II.
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."
From An Essay on Man
Alexander Pope
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good....
faint
in deep space,
immense as a brain
down
through the thought-
shaft it drifts, a wale
of light to
which the retina
opens and is centered
time and
space dis-
appearing as the mind
recedes
to a soundless
flickering somewhere
deeper
than consciousness
where, permanent as
change
a whorl of light
rides, wheeling in darkness
Hudibras - Mathematician
Samuel Butler
In mathematics he was greater
Than Tycho Brahe, or Erra Pater:
For he, by geometric scale,
Could take the size of pots and ale;
Resolve, by sines and tangents straight,
If bread and butter wanted weight;
And wisely tell what hour o’ th’ day
The clock does strike, by Algebra.
"I am Like a Slip
of Comet…"
Gerard Manley Hopkins
- I am like a slip of comet
Scarce worth discovery, in some corner seen
Bridging the slender difference of two stars,
Come out of space, or suddenly engender'd
By heady elements, for no man knows;
But when she sights the sun she grows and sizes
And spins her skirt out, while her central star
Shakes its cocooning mists; and so she comes
To fields of light; millions of travelling rays
Pierce her; she hangs upon the flame-cased sun,
And sucks the light as full as Gideon's fleece:
But then her tether calls her; she falls off,
And as she dwindles shreds her smock of gold
Between the sistering planets, till she comes
To single Saturn, last and solitary;
And then she goes out into the cavernous dark.
So I go out: my little sweet is done:
I have drawn heat from this contagious sun;
To not ungentle death now forth I run.