Poetry Thursday

Here’s a poem that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, with thanks to Dame Eleanor, who mentioned this poet in a comment. I’ve read others of hers, but not this one:

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

***

As I’m working on Silver Circle, and Justin’s got that thing with math, so a title combining beauty and Euclid caught my eye. I do like math, of course, though I’m definitely someone who has but far away heard the brush of Beauty’s sandal on stone, since I’m not by any means a mathematician.

You know who was a mathematician? Archimedes. And you know where the very best presentation of Archimedes is in all of fiction? In Bradshaw’s The Sand-Reckoner. You’ve all read this book, right? I mean, you have, yes?

No?

Well, to appreciate the beauty of math, here, have Archimedes, who loves math and you can see the beauty of geometry through his eyes.

Also, Bradshaw does such an amazing job writing a mathematical genius, thus demonstrating how to write genius characters when you aren’t a genius, so that’s well worth admiring.

Also, it’s just a fun story:

The young scholar Archimedes has just had the best three years of his life at Ptolemy’s Museum at Alexandria. To be able to talk and think all day, every day, sharing ideas and information with the world’s greatest minds, is heaven to Archimedes. But heaven must be forsaken when he learns that his father is ailing, and his home city of Syracuse is at war with the Romans. … Reluctant but resigned, Archimedes takes himself home to find a job building catapults as a royal engineer. Though Syracuse is no Alexandria, Archimedes also finds that life at home isn’t as boring or confining as he originally thought. He finds fame and loss, love and war, wealth and betrayal — none of which affects him nearly as much as the divine beauty of mathematics.

The betrayal mentioned above does not really count as a betrayal. I mention that in case the word “betrayal” is an extreme turnoff to any of you when you see it in a book description. It is for me. Even if you feel the same way, seriously, don’t worry about that here. Actually, you don’t really have to worry about the loss or war either. There are sad things in this story, but not, I think, *too* sad. Anybody who’s read it can chime in.

***

Now that we’re through July, let me just add, RIHASI blew MARAG away when it came to pages read in one month. It’s not quite twice as many, but nearly. Also, RIHASI has now, in one month, easily paid for its cover, for its audiobook, for the entire series promo I ran at the beginning of the month, with a good bit left over. Not to mention the stellar reviews, which make me very happy! Thanks again to everyone who’s taken the time to post a review!