![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerAfter skipping a week because I was in a campground without any sort of connectivity (yay!), we resume Poetry Monday:
The Icosasphere, Marianne Moore
In Buckinghamshire hedgerows the birds nesting in the merged green density, weave little bits of string and moths and feathers and thistledown, in parabolic concentric curves and, working for concavity, leave spherical feats of rare efficiency; whereas through lack of integration,
avid for someone’s fortune, three were slain and ten committed perjury, six died, two killed themselves, and two paid fines for risks they’d run. But then there is the icosasphere in which at last we have steel-cutting at its summit of economy, since twenty triangles conjoined, can wrap one
ball or double-rounded shell with almost no waste, so geometrically neat, it’s an icosahedron. Would the engineers making one, or Mr. J. O. Jackson tell us how the Egyptians could have set up seventy-eight-foot solid granite vertically? We should like to know how that was done.
Moore (1887-1972) was an important Modernist, one who often chose to work in regular, unrhymed stanzas with varied line lengths based on the number of syllables, rather than an accentual meter or free verse. As she admits in the third stanza, she’s talking about the geometric solid usually called a regular icosahedron a.k.a. a d20.
---L.
Subject quote from Charing Cross, Cecil Roberts.
The Icosasphere, Marianne Moore
In Buckinghamshire hedgerows the birds nesting in the merged green density, weave little bits of string and moths and feathers and thistledown, in parabolic concentric curves and, working for concavity, leave spherical feats of rare efficiency; whereas through lack of integration,
avid for someone’s fortune, three were slain and ten committed perjury, six died, two killed themselves, and two paid fines for risks they’d run. But then there is the icosasphere in which at last we have steel-cutting at its summit of economy, since twenty triangles conjoined, can wrap one
ball or double-rounded shell with almost no waste, so geometrically neat, it’s an icosahedron. Would the engineers making one, or Mr. J. O. Jackson tell us how the Egyptians could have set up seventy-eight-foot solid granite vertically? We should like to know how that was done.
Moore (1887-1972) was an important Modernist, one who often chose to work in regular, unrhymed stanzas with varied line lengths based on the number of syllables, rather than an accentual meter or free verse. As she admits in the third stanza, she’s talking about the geometric solid usually called a regular icosahedron a.k.a. a d20.
---L.
Subject quote from Charing Cross, Cecil Roberts.