Imagination suffers, being free.
The real world gets more curious with time.
So play with method. Study how you see,
and by a prism
unweave the rainbow
and do not fear to write in red on lime,
but if the colour scatters carelessly
then look for method, metre, even rhyme,
and by a prison
shape a poem.
Yes, this is rainbow--poem, take 2.
[Edit: I've edited the title, because, staring at it after it was up, I realised that my original title of 'Humanism' mostly just fogged things up by linking it to a whole slew of ideas that were only partially related. Atheism has a much sharper denotation.
I don't know what it is about this poem that makes me so impulsive in posting it.]
This is what happens when a mathematician tries to write poetry.
About Me
- Lynet
- Actually, I like parabolas best, but ellipses and hyperbolas are good, too. 'Lynet' is my favourite spelling of Thomas Malory's 'Damosel Sauvage', from my favourite re-telling of the story.
Blogroll
- An Apostate's Chapel
- Bridging Schisms
- Chromium Oxide Green
- Dangerous Intersection
- Daylight Atheism
- Digital Cuttlefish
- Evolutionary Middleman
- Greta Christina's Blog
- Higgaion
- Intrinsically Knotted
- JD2718
- Letters from a broad...
- Masculinity and its Discontents
- No More Hornets
- Pharyngula
- PoemShape
- Seedlings in Stone
- The Greenbelt
- This is you reading about me ... or not.
- Wild About Math
7 comments:
Perfect. I absolutely agree with the idea that without some kind of structure or restriction, we can't go as far. "Imagination suffers, being free" indeed.
This one is working better. In fact, I thought it was a different poem, until I got to the end. Then of course I remembered those lines I had loved so well.
I love the poet in you. :)
Nice, and I like it more than the previous version.
I keep wanting to change "shape" though, in the last line... "construct" seems a bit too analytical. "devise", playing off "divide"=unweave? "unlock", "set free" or "release" maybe, contrasting "prison"; or "ensnare" perhaps, which builds on it?
anyway... it's still good. :-)
Susan,
Thank you. One of the best bits of feedback a poet can get is that the central idea actually does come across!
LL,
You thought it was a different poem? Wow. It really did need changing, then, because this idea was always lurking underneath.
This isn't going to be the final version, either, though. You see, it bothered me that there were more sentence breaks in the first stanza than the second. The capital letters were all unbalanced. So I took the 'ands' out of the next-to-final lines of both stanzas, and got something snappy and pared down, but with less metrical structure to lean on, which basically made its faults stick out more, so now I have to make what it's actually saying work better.
I don't know. One change leads to another . . .
Joffan,
That's interesting about "shape". I originally had "unlock", but I felt like it was vaguely cheesy, to be honest, like the subtitle on my favourite book about poetry ("Unlocking the Poet Within").
"Release" might work, I suppose. I don't know why, though, but I sort of felt more like downplaying that line, like the juxtaposition was too blatant, poetic, contrived. Maybe I was wrong about that.
One change does lead to another. :)
Now, I'm really looking forward to you doing some kind of post about the new U.S. presidency. I'm sure you'll have something fun or interesting to say about it!
Well, what do you know? I must have been posting just as you wrote that!
New, simpler suggestion to replace "shape": "weave".
but in any case, if you can honour Dawkins, surely you can also nod at Fry. :-)
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