Hall and Knight -- E V Rieu

In a somewhat lighter vein...

(Poem #601) Hall and Knight or 'z + b + x = y + b + z' When he was young his cousins used to say of Mr Knight: 'This boy will write an algebra - or looks as if he might.' And sure enough, when Mr Knight had grown to be a man, He purchased pen and paper and an inkpot, and began. But he very soon discovered that he couldn't write at all, And his heart was filled with yearnings for a certain Mr Hall; Till, after many years of doubt, he sent his friend a card: 'Have tried to write an Algebra, but find it very hard.' Now Mr Hall himself had tried to write a book for schools, But suffered from a handicap: he didn't know the rules. So when he heard from Mr Knight and understood his gist, He answered him by telegram: 'Delighted to assist.' So Mr Hall and Mr Knight they took a house together, And they worked away at algebra in any kind of weather, Determined not to give up until they had evolved A problem so constructed that it never could be solved. 'How hard it is', said Mr Knight, 'to hide the fact from youth That x and y are equal: it is such an obvious truth!' 'It is', said Mr Hall, 'but if we gave a b to each, We'd put the problem well beyond our little victims' reach. 'Or are you anxious, Mr Knight, lest any boy should see The utter superfluity of this repeated b?' 'I scarcely fear it', he replied, and scratched this grizzled head, 'But perhaps it would be safer if to b we added z.' 'A brilliant stroke!', said Hall, and added z to either side; Then looked at his accomplice with a flush of happy pride. And Knight, he winked at Hall (a very pardonable lapse). And they printed off the Algebra and sold it to the chaps. -- E V Rieu

A hilarious poem - if poets and writers can be immortalised in verse, why
not those old tormentors of many a student, Hall and Knight? Commentary is
almost superfluous - suffice it to say that I loved the poem, and that
'accomplice' is as perfect a choice of words as any I've seen.

Notes:

  Hall and Knight's "Higher Algebra" is surely one of the most famous (I
  will not speak for 'best-loved' <g>) mathematics textbooks of all time,
  second perhaps only to Euclid's Elements in its ubiquity[1]. First
  published in 1887, it is, as far as I know, still in print (at least in
  India, where it is published by Deepa and Company [2][3]; I could not find
  a copy on any of the major book sites). The book is a bit dated today, but
  still well worth a look if only for its historical value.

  The poem, though, more likely refers to their earlier 'Elementary Algebra
  for Schools', to which the more famous book was a sequel.

  'z' is, of course, pronounced 'zed' throughout.

[1] Both Joyce and Wodehouse, for instance, mention it.
[2] [broken link] http://www.vidyainfo.com/books/BookDetails.asp?cid=279&cbid=1479
[3] and where it is still popular as an excellent source of problems

Biography:

Couldn't find a proper biography of Rieu online - here're a few snippets I
managed to dig up:

- He was the founder editor of the Penguin Classics

    During the blitz in 1940 a Dr E V. Rieu started a new translation on the
    Homer's Odyssey. This appeared in 1946 as the first Penguin Classic, and
    enabled those in education to pass examinations and enlightentened those
    who read for shear pleasure.

 -- [broken link] http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/apm/publishing/culture/1997/keating.html

- He was a translator of some note (Homer's 'Odyssey', Virgil's 'Ecologues',
  Apollonius of Rhodes' 'The Voyage of Argo').

  Patrick Kavanagh has written a poem titled "On Looking into E. V. Rieu's
  Homer" - see [broken link] http://www.ume.maine.edu/~npf/cat10.html

- He was a friend of the great science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon

   The preface to Waking World reveals that Stapledon could accept criticism
   and was willing to rewrite when necessary, for he twice refers to a
   rejected earlier version of the book and credits five people for helping
   him revise it into acceptable shape: these included his wife Agnes; E.V.
   Rieu, a long-time friend and an editor at Methuen; and Professor L.C.
   Martin of Liverpool University.

     -- [broken link] http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7628/stapledon/bio.html

- An sf/f piece, 'The Paint Box' appeared in an anthology titled 'The
  Unicorn Treasury' - see [broken link] http://www.locusmag.com/index/t117.html#A9659

Links:

Here's another poem by Rieu: [broken link] http://www.gulftel.com/thefacks/poem.html

And as for Messrs. Hall and Knight, I was amazed at the sheer lack of
webpages devoted to them and their minor classic. Even the Britannica is
uncharacteristically silent on the subject.

Here are a couple I did manage to find:

  [broken link] http://www.pa.ash.org.au/canberramaths/doks/Ed_Staple's_article.html makes
  an interesting read, especially if you're mathematically inclined.
  (Warning - the page displays all the equations as gifs, and takes forever
  to load)

  [broken link] http://libweb.princeton.edu:2003/libraries/firestone/rbsc/finding_aids/mathoral/pmc38.htm
  has a passing reference to an entire course at Princeton (in the 1930s)
  being based on Hall and Knight.

Today's poem forms part of the Mathematical Poetry theme, which began with
  poem #599

-martin

The Mouse's Tale -- Lewis Carroll

The poetry of mathematics, eh? How about the poetry of mathematicians... ?

(Poem #600) The Mouse's Tale Fury said to a mouse, That he met in the house, 'Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you.-- Come, I'll take no denial; We must have a trial: For really this morning I've nothing to do.' Said the mouse to the cur, 'Such a trial, dear Sir, With no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.' 'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,' Said cunning old Fury: 'I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.' -- Lewis Carroll

Possibly the canonical example of emblematic verse - that is, verse
formatted so as to visually resemble its theme. Here's the text that
immediately precedes this charming piece of doggerel:

" "You promised to tell me your history, you know", said Alice, "and why it
is you hate -- C and D", she added in a whisper, half afraid that it would
be offended again.

"Mine is a long and a sad tale!" said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and
sighing.

"It _is_ a long tail, certainly", said Alice, looking down with wonder at
the Mouse's tail; "but why do you call it sad?" And she kept on puzzling
about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was
something like this -- " "

        -- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Curiously enough, "in the original manuscript of the book, an entirely
different poem appears as the tale; in a way, a more appropriate one, for it
fulfills the mouse's promise to explain why he dislikes cats and dogs,
whereas the tale as it appears [in the published version] contains no
reference to cats" [1].

Here's the unpublished original:

        We lived beneath the mat,
        Warm and snug and fat.
        But one woe, and that
        Was the cat!

        To our joys a clog.
        In our eyes a fog.
        On our hearts a log
        Was the dog!

        When the cat's away,
        Then the mice will play.
        But alas! one day;
        (So, they say)

        Came the dog and cat
        Hunting for a rat,
        Crushed the mice all flat,
        Each one as he sat,
        Underneath the mat,
        Warm and snug and fat.
        Think of that! "

        -- Lewis Carroll, draft manuscript of Alice in Wonderland.

(Aren't you glad Carroll chose to go with the revised version in the book?)

thomas.

[1] Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice.

[Links]

Several emblematic poems have already featured on the Minstrels:

'Easter Wings' by George Herbert, poem #567
(It was in response to this poem that Anustup Datta pointed out the
technical phrase for the genre, and suggested today's poem for the list.
Thanks, Anustup).

'Landscape: I' by bpNichol, poem #498

'A Prayer to the Sun', by Geoffrey Hill, poem #349

We've visited Lewis Carroll before:
poem #52
poem #265
poem #347
poem #409
The second of these pages has a brief biography of the poet, including the
immortal line "As a mathematician, Carroll was ... derivative" <grin>. A
longer biography can (as usual) be found in Britannica, http://www.eb.com

[Trivia]

Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Dodgson arrived
at this pen name by taking his own names Charles Lutwidge, translating them
into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus, then reversing and retranslating them into
English.

[More Trivia]

You may have heard the story that Queen Victoria loved Alice in Wonderland
so much that she requested a copy of Lewis Carroll's next book; her reward
was a treatise on determinants [1]. Unfortunately, it's just that - a story.
In the second edition of Symbolic Logic, Dodgson writes: "I take this
opportunity of giving what publicity I can to my contradiction of a silly
story, which has been going the round of the papers, about my having
presented certain books to Her Majesty the Queen. It is so constantly
repeated, and is such absolute fiction, that I think it worthwhile to state,
once for all, that it is utterly false in every particular; nothing even
resembling it has ever occurred." .

[1] Different versions of the story name different books - Symbolic Logic,
The Condensation of Determinants, Euclid and his Rivals...

[And Finally]

"'I'll be judge, I'll be jury,'Said cunning old Fury:" is more than a little
reminiscent of Fit the Sixth from the Hunting of the Snark: the Barrister's
Dream. Herewith, the relevant extract:

   He dreamed that he stood in a shadowy Court,
        Where the Snark, with a glass in its eye,
   Dressed in gown, bands, and wig, was defending a pig
        On the charge of deserting its sty.

   ...

   But the Judge said he never had summed up before;
        So the Snark undertook it instead,
   And summed it so well that it came to far more
        Than the Witnesses ever had said!

   When the verdict was called for, the Jury declined,
        As the word was so puzzling to spell;
   But they ventured to hope that the Snark wouldn't mind
        Undertaking that duty as well.

        -- Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

'Snark', of course, is probably the greatest piece of nonsense literature
ever written; the full text is at
[broken link] http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/carrol02.html

Geometry -- Rita Dove

This week's theme - the poetry of mathematics

(Poem #599) Geometry I prove a theorem and the house expands: the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling, the ceiling floats away with a sigh. As the walls clear themselves of everything but transparency, the scent of carnations leaves with them. I am out in the open and above the windows have hinged into butterflies, sunlight glinting where they've intersected. They are going to some point true and unproven. -- Rita Dove

It is always refreshing to see a poem that truly appreciates the twin
beauties of nature and mathematics[1]. Dove's quietly understated 'Geometry'
is a fine example - very well constructed, and with a fine sense of balance
between what many people would see as entirely antithetical elements.

The poem's development is highly visual - the house fades into a geometrical
abstraction in a manner reminiscent of a computerised animation (one is
reminded, too, of architect's exploded wireframe diagrams, the components
separated, everything rendered in transparent outline). The scent of
carnations vanishes - another reduction, since smell has no place in the
clean, austere world of geometry. And then, in a sudden reversal, the
windows 'hinge into butterflies' and, glittering in the sunlight, fly off to
'some point true and unproven'. The whole reads like nothing so much as a
scene from Fantasia 2001, complete with the wave of a wizard's wand ("I
prove a theorem") to set the whole process into motion.

The last line, incidentally, is what made the poem for me - indeed, were I
writing the poem I'd have been strongly tempted to break the verse structure
and set it off in a verse by itself. It is astonishing on how many levels it
works. Carrying on the visual expansion, it evokes the image of a vanishing
point at infinity, suggesting thereby the convergence of all the poem's
elements. The 'true and unproven' could be a promise that the rich mine of
mathematical discovery is far from played out, or even a suggestion that
there will be things forever beyond mathematics. It is certainly a reference
to Gödel's theorem, one of the most beautiful and surprising mathematical
results of this century. And finally, it wraps up the poem neatly,
counterbalancing the opening gesture and suggesting that every proof
releases a flock of mathematical butterflies to hover just out of reach.

[1] Yes, this is in part a dig at Whitman's 'Learned Astronomer', the poem
that epitomises the other point of view, and is sadly what many people
think of first when they associate science and poetry.

Biography:

  Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952. Her books of poetry include On
  the Bus with Rosa Parks (W. W. Norton, 1999), which was named a New York
  Times Notable Book of the Year and is a finalist for the National Book
  Critics Circle Award; Mother Love (1995); Selected Poems (1993); Grace
  Notes (1989); Thomas and Beulah (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize for
  Poetry; Museum (1983); and The Yellow House on the Corner (1980). She has
  also published Fifth Sunday (1985), a book of short stories; Through the
  Ivory Gate (1992), a novel; and The Darker Face of the Earth (1994), a
  verse drama. Her many honors include the Academy's Lavan Younger Poets
  Award, a Mellon Foundation grant, an NAACP Great American Artist award,
  Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and grants and
  fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National
  Endowment for the Humanities. She served at Poet Laureate of the United
  States from 1993 to 1995 and is Commonwealth Professor of English at the
  University of Virginia. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

        -- [broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=188

Links:

The anthology that prompted this week's theme:
http://www.kate.stange.com/mathweb/mathpoet.html

Here's a much fuller biography:
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b/compbio.html

It's interesting to compare today's poem to Kreymborg's similarly titled
'Geometry': poem #306

And the notorious Whitman poem: poem #54

As always, guest contributions to the theme are welcome.

-martin

For A Poet -- Countee Cullen

Guest poem submitted by Sunil Iyengar:

(Poem #598) For A Poet I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth, And laid them away in a box of gold; Where long will cling the lips of the moth, I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth; I hide no hate, I am not even wroth Who found earth's breath so keen and cold; I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth, And laid them away in a box of gold. -- Countee Cullen

I nominate this poem as a companion to Yeats' "He Wishes for the Clothes of
Heaven" [1]. Cullen seems to have been a spirited elegist, generous enough
to acknowledge his debts (see "To John Keats, Poet at Springtime", "For Paul
Laurence Dunbar") and slightly incredulous of his vocation ("Yet I Do
Marvel"). His life was brief (1903-1946), but within it he triumphed:
earning honors at New York University and Harvard, publishing his first book
before graduation, then becoming a Harlem Renaissance figure. He spent his
last years teaching in the New York City public schools.

"For a Poet" basks in the Celtic twilight. Besides adhering to Yeats' lyric
in key respects -- eight lines long, both poems are in a loose tetrameter,
pondering the fragility of dreams, and stating "cloth" or "cloths" three
times each, normally at the end of a line -- besides all this, Cullen's poem
suggests "The Song of Wandering Aengus" [2], with its conclusive "gold"
imagery, not to speak of the moth's flutter.

Sunil Iyengar.

[1] poem #597
[2] poem #1 - yup, the very
first poem ever run on the Minstrels. Indeed, I got the idea for this
mailing list after coming across this gem of a poem and wanting to share it
with some friends - t.

[Biography]

        b. May 30, 1903, Louisville, Ky.?, U.S.
        d. Jan. 9, 1946, New York, N.Y.
in full COUNTEE PORTER CULLEN American poet, one of the finest of the Harlem
Renaissance.

Reared by a woman who was probably his paternal grandmother, Countee at age
15 was unofficially adopted by the Reverend F.A. Cullen, minister of Salem
M.E. Church, one of Harlem's largest congregations. He won a citywide poetry
contest as a schoolboy and saw his winning stanzas widely reprinted. At New
York University (B.A., 1925) he won the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize and was
elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Major American literary magazines accepted his
poems regularly, and his first collection of poems, Color (1925), was
published to critical acclaim before he had finished college.

Cullen received an M.A. degree from Harvard University in 1926 and worked as
an assistant editor for Opportunity magazine. In 1928, just before leaving
the United States for France (where he would study on a Guggenheim
Fellowship), Cullen married Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois
(divorced 1930). After publication of The Black Christ and Other Poems
(1929), Cullen's reputation as a poet waned. From 1934 until the end of his
life he taught in New York City public schools. Most notable among his other
works are Copper Sun (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1928), and The
Medea and Some Poems (1935). His novel One Way to Heaven (1932) depicts life
in Harlem.

Cullen's use of racial themes in his verse was striking at the time, and his
material is always fresh and sensitively treated. He drew some criticism,
however, because he was heavily influenced by the Romanticism of John Keats
and preferred to use classical verse forms rather than rely on the rhythms
and idioms of his black American heritage.

        -- EB

He wishes for the cloths of heaven -- William Butler Yeats

Guest poem submitted by Tina George:

(Poem #597) He wishes for the cloths of heaven Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. -- William Butler Yeats

I simply love this verse...I cannot think of any other lines that better
express my deepest thoughts about the question one so often searches for the
answers to: 'what is love?'

I first came across these lines in a book called "The Charmed Circle", when
I was all of 14 years old... To my young and (as yet) unimpressioned mind,
it spoke of a love so deep, so earnest and so 'giving' that it stayed with
me through the years in the quiet recesses of my mind, echoing gentle
reminders in soft undertones... "Tread softly because you tread on my
dreams"...

The years may have flown by since then and my impressions of love washed in
the many colours of experience... but the spirit of this verse remains.

Tina.