More of Yeats and Geometry

      A blog-posting I made last week spoke of the use by poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) of geometry in his poetry.  Here is another vivid example:

The Second Coming    by William Butler Yeats

     Turning and turning in the widening gyre
     The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
     Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
     The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
     The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
     The best lack all conviction, while the worst
     Are full of passionate intensity.

     Surely some revelation is at hand;
     Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
     The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
     When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
     Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
     A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
     A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
     Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
     Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
     The darkness drops again; but now I know
     That twenty centuries of stony sleep
     Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
     And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
     Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?     

 Read more about Yeats and his work here.

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.