Yeats and Geometry

      Spelman College Professor Emeritus Colm Mulcahy is a mathematician and scholar whose talents and interests reach far and wide.  An email from him alerted me to a website exploring the work of his fellow Irishman, poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).  In particular Mulcahy alerted me to links between Yeats' poetry and Geometry.

     And these new connections to Yeats led me to think back to college days, to my reading of Yeats in a course in "Modern Poetry"  -- and to remember the way that my thoughts were swept into the air by "The Wild Swans at Coole."  I offer below its opening stanzas, followed by a link to the rest of the poem.

     The Wild Swans at Coole      by William Butler Yeats

      The trees are in their autumn beauty,
      The woodland paths are dry,
      Under the October twilight the water
      Mirrors a still sky;
      Upon the brimming water among the stones
      Are nine-and-fifty swans.

      The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
      Since I first made my count;
      I saw, before I had well finished,
      All suddenly mount
      And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
      Upon their clamorous wings.

       . . .                            Yeats' complete poem is available here at PoetryFoundation.org.

Math-play via verse (with George Darley)

A recent email from Colm Mulcahy -- who seeks out all things Irish -- alerted me to Dublin poet and math-text author, George Darley (1795-1846), and an online archived collection of his poems.    Colm's email had opened the collection to pages 70-71 and there I found -- and had fun reading --  this poem that plays with math.

     A Poetical Problem.      by George Darley

     Once on a time, at evening hour,
     A sweet, and dewy-bosom'd Flower
            Was cradling up to rest ;
     A Pilgrim, wandering near her bed,
     Raised, with his staff, her drooping head,
            And thus the Flower addrest : 

     "From matin-rise to moonlight hour,
     Tell me, my pearly-crested Flower,
            How many a lucid gem
     Hath left the high, cavernal air,
     To form upon thy queenly hair
            A rainbow diadem?" 

A 6 x 6 syllable-square -- and links to more . . .

          Last Sunday's paper had
          an essay by a clown
          who said as long as I
          play dumb people let me
          do what I want.  And I
          cannot stop wondering.

 6, a perfect number    

Find lots of mathy poems here at TalkingWriting.com; this week featuring Sarah Glaz.

At this link find poems, etc. by Spelman College math students working with Colm Mulcahy.

Rabbis should learn to solve quadratics

     Thanks to mathemagician Colm Mulcahy who connected me with poet Lisa Dordal -- and thanks to her for permission to offer these lines, entertainingly seasoned with math words:

Why Rabbis Need to Know
How to Solve Quadratic Equations  

                                         by Lisa Dordal (with help from Laurie Samuels)

Because they are good exercise
for your logic muscles, which you’ll need
to work through those pesky J says-P says conflicts of text –- 
the bumpy remains of a Torah affair. 

Behind the cards -- mathematics

A couple of weeks ago at an MAA math lecture by Alissa Crans on the Catalan numbers, I sat near card-trick mathematician Colm Mulcahy.  And I asked him if he knew any poems about card tricks and their mathematics.
   Though he at first said "no," Mulcahy turned out to have a couple of connections up his sleeve.  From Matthew Wright he learned of "The Card Players" -- a colorful sonnet from Philip Larkin's 1974 collection High Windows and available here with selections of Adriaen Brouwer's art.  
     And Bruce Reznick reminded him of the lyrics for "The Gambler" by Kenny Rogers.  The complete lyrics may be found here; I include below a stanza that offers some instruction about counting.