Twenty-five years ago I had an enormous appetite for poems by Stevie Smith (1902-1971). I loved the way that they seemed so unstudied -- playful and yet spot on and profound. Smith did not use much mathematics in her poetry, but she wrote this poem, "Numbers."
Numbers by Stevie Smith
A thousand and fifty-one waves
Two hundred and thirty-one seagulls
A cliff of four hundred feet
Three miles of ploughed fields
One house
Four windows look on the waves
Four windows look on the ploughed fields
One skylight looks on the sky
In that skylight's sky is one seagull.
Smith's "Numbers" is found in her Collected Poems (New Directions, 1983).
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Very nice...Dimensions upon images upon dimensions!
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