The sum of 2k – 4
From one to thirteen plus a score,
Over eleven,
Plus eighteen times seven,
Equals six cubed and not a bit more.
(Will Nediger, “Can Math Limericks Survive?”, Word Ways 37:3 [August 2004], 238.)
Poems
“Ascot Waistcoat”
Prescott, press my Ascot waistcoat —
Let’s not risk it
Just to whisk it:
Yes, my Ascot waistcoat, Prescott.
Worn subfusc, it’s
Cool and dusk: it
Might be grass-cut
But it’s Ascot,
And it fits me like a gasket —
Ascot is the waistcoat, Prescott!
Please get
Off the spot of grease. Get
Going, Prescott —
Where’s that waistcoat?
It’s no task at
All, an Ascot:
Easy as to clean a musket
Or to dust an ivory tusk. It
Doesn’t take a lot of fuss. Get
To it, Prescott,
Since I ask it:
We can’t risk it —
Let’s not whisk it.
That’s the waistcoat;
Thank you, Prescott.
— David McCord
Chamber Music
First Violin: I, in love with the beauty of this world, endow it with my own beauty. The world has no abyss. Streaming out, my heart spends itself. I am only song: I sound.
Second Violin: For me, beside your more ethereal being, it is forbidden to have an I. Not the world — but more firmly and substantially: the earth has taught me. There it is growing dark. Let me accompany you, sister!
Viola: My grey hair makes it my duty to name the abyss for you. As you two childlike kindred spirits skim along, even the quarrel about nothing becomes attractive. But I suffer.
Cello: I know in my heart of hearts, that all is fate, the finely done and the unrelieved. I am true to the whole: enjoy life and repent! I do not warn. I weep with you. I console.
— Josef Weinheber (translated by Patrick Bridgewater)
Impromptu
If the man who turnips cries
Cry not when hs father dies,
‘Tis a proof that he had rather
Have a turnip than his father.
— Samuel Johnson
Inspiration
Anna Rabinowitz’s 80-page poem Darkling is an acrostic of Thomas Hardy’s 1900 poem “The Darkling Thrush” — taking the first letter of each line in Rabinowitz’s poem spells out Hardy’s.
“I found myself … haunted by ‘The Darkling Thrush,'” she said, “by its tone of millennial mourning, by its note of hope in the thrush’s song, and most especially by its opening line which situates the poet at he meditates on the passing century: ‘I leant upon a coppice gate.'”
“Fifth Philosopher’s Song”
A million million spermatozoa,
All of them alive;
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne —
But the One was Me.
Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
Taking ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,
If you’d quietly died!
— Aldous Huxley
Medley
By Louis Phillips, a poem that reads the same upside down:
MOM SWIMS WOW
“The Sniffle”
In spite of her sniffle
Isabel’s chiffle.
Some girls with a sniffle
Would be weepy and tiffle;
They would look awful,
Like a rained-on waffle,
But Isabel’s chiffle
In spite of her sniffle.
Her nose is more red
With a cold in her head,
But then, to be sure,
Her eyes are bluer.
Some girls with a snuffle,
Their tempers are uffle.
But when Isabel’s snivelly
She’s snivelly civilly,
And when she’s snuffly
She’s perfectly luffly.
— Ogden Nash
“The Elephant; or the Force of Habit”
A tail behind, a trunk in front,
Complete the usual elephant.
The tail in front, the trunk behind,
Is what you very seldom find;
If you for specimens should hunt
With trunks behind and tails in front,
That hunt would occupy you long;
The force of habit is so strong.
— A.E. Housman
“A Square Poem”
This poem, by Lewis Carroll, can be read line by line in the conventional way, but the same text results when it’s scanned “downward” in columns, reading the first word of each of the six lines, then the second, and so on:
I often wondered when I cursed Often feared where I would be -- Wondered where she'd yield her love, When I yield, so will she. I would her will be pitied! Cursed be love! She pitied me ...