Irish poet McGovern to visit US

     Irish poet and physicist Iggy McGovern will visit the US in October and is scheduled to read at 

The Writer's Center in Bethesda--Saturday, October 14 at 3 PM.  

McGovern's poetry has been featured earlier in this blog -- including "Belfast Inequalities" and "Proverbs for the Computer Age" on December 20, 2015  and "Geometry" on January 12, 2016.  This latter poem, "Geometry" is the opening poem in A Mystic Dream of 4 (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2013) -- a sonnet sequence based on the life of mathematician William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865).  Also a poet, Hamilton grew up in Ireland in a time of prominence for British romantic poets of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) -- and I offer below a McGovern sonnet that links Hamilton to Coleridge.     

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Poet & Sage)     by Iggy McGovern 

       This sonnet about Coleridge is accompanied by this note:  

Wordsworth remarked that Hamilton reminded him more of Coleridge than any other man he ever met.  

Hamilton considered himself a disciple of Coleridge, imbibing his ideas on philosophy, science, and religion.

He had the wisdom and vocabulary
Of someone born decades before his season:
I wrote Time Real and Imaginary
When he had barely reached the use of reason.

His Abel, Reason, not its Cain-like twin
Of Understanding, stood him in good stead;
He knew which one would ultimately win
And turn the Bible story on its head.

Arithmetic derives from intuition
Of time, which words of mine would not gainsay
The mathematics of his erudition
And like The Baptist who prepared the way

I did not witness his re-Kanted rime
That Algebra's the Science of Pure Time.

This website, The Friends of Coleridge, offers opportunities to learn more about the life and ideas and publications of this poet-philosopher.