[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Good afternoon. Great to see you all here.
Um, the title of this lecture, Lisping in Numbers Poems That Count, derives in part from a famous line of Alexander Pope.
I list in numbers. For the numbers came.
Pope's line comes from an epistle poem. And to put it in context, uh, the line is about how Pope is a poet born not made.
He can't help it. He was born speaking in verse. The poem is addressed to his ailing friend Doctor Arbuthnot,
and it's a sometimes delightful and hilarious and sometimes moving rant on the trials and tribulations of the writing life,
and especially on the problem of other poets.
Is there a parson much bemused in beer?
A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer, a clerk for doomed his father's soul to cross, who pens a stanza when he should engross three things.
Another's modest wishes bound my friendship.
And a prologue and £10. Why did I write?
What send to me unknown dipped me in ink.
My parents or my own as yet a child.
Nor yet a fool to fame. I list in numbers for the numbers came.
I left no idle calling. I left no calling for this idle trade.
No duty broke. No father disobeyed the muse.
But served to ease some friend, not wife.
To help me through this long disease.
My life. And we might think of Pope as someone in in constant chronic pain.
Um. Doctor Arbuthnot, a Scottish satirist, physicist, physician and polymath, um was a founding member of the Slipper's Scribblers Club,
whose members included Pope and Jonathan Swift and was deemed to be the wittiest of the lot.
Um, but he was modest about taking credit for his productions, even allowing his children to burn his papers.
Um, he made his living, though chiefly from teaching mathematics, and he is best known for his contributions to that field.
So it seems to make sense that Pope's use of numbers here, a logical term for heroic couplets written in a strict ten syllable line,
has something to do with the predilections and talents of his friend.
We might think of numbers and mathematics as antithetical in some ways to poetry, but at least in terms of vocabulary, there is significant overlap.
Numbers here mean simply verse poetry.
Measure is another term, and metre means the same thing, which could apply equally to poetry or to say, geometry.
But what do numbers, counting and operations like addition, subtraction, division and multiplication even algebra have to do with poetry?
Intriguingly, more than you might think.
I know that when I encounter a number in a poem, something in me sits up and take notice that I am on alert for something about to happen.
Nonetheless, we are used to thinking of poets essential to the humanities as being in some ways opposed to math.
Maths. I'm American, so I see math and accounting of all kinds, particularly with money.
Poets, um, famously, do not tend to have overmuch of that.
Um, this view is very well put by Wendy Cope in her poem temps.
Although this poetic in numeracy, she lays at the feet exclusively of certain male poets.
Um, and this is from her book Serious Concerns, and I think I actually heard her read this, um, a long time ago at Oxford when it first came out.
Temps don't ask him for the time of day.
He won't know it, for he's the abstracted sort.
In fact, he's a typically useless male poet.
We'll call him a temp for short. A temp isn't punctual or smart or efficient.
He probably can't drive a car or follow a map, though he's very proficient at finding his way to the bar.
He may have great talent, and not just for writing, for drawing, or playing the drums.
But don't let him loose on accounts. That's inviting disaster.
A tump can't do sums. He cannot get organised.
Just watch him try it and you'll see a frustrated man.
But sometimes. And these are the worst ones. Deny it and angrily tell you they can.
I used to be close to a temp. Who would bellow? You think I can't add two and two and get even crosser when smiling and mellow?
I answered. You're quite right, I do. Women poets are business like, able, good drivers and right on the ball.
And some of us still know our seven times table.
We're not like the temps. Not at all. Um, I may even know at least one of the terms that she's referring to, but he can sort of drive.
Um, so this is sort of maybe how we tend to think of poets.
Um, but actually there ends up being quite a lot of accounting and counting and poetry.
Um, I trust we won't run into too many times today, though there might be a couple,
but we'll start with numbers themselves, and in particular with counting A-b-c.
Easy as one, two, three. As one Bard once said, the sequence of numbers has something of the magical properties of the alphabet.
Um. I'm currently reading a book by Paul Lockhart on algebra written for laypeople.
I'm very much a layperson. Um, partly because I like the title The Mending of Broken Bones,
which is a colourful translation of the Arabic of algebra and the first chapter on numbers.
Lockhart defines counting as essentially matching in the typical case of a collection of rocks or coins or marbles or whatever,
we may match each item in turn with a previously established, societally agreed upon list of number words at the end of our counting process.
We arrive at the words indicating the quantity in question.
So counting is a kind of magic spell of syllables that must be said in a certain order.
These syllables are, in a sense, random. One, two, three, four could just as easily be.
And, uh, the three are test set up, for instance. Or eeny, meeny miny moe or fee fi fo fum.
It may be important that these syllables are easy to differentiate from each other.
We will see how that works in English. 123456789 ten.
Each has a separate constellation of rhymes, and none rhymes with each other.
The first number rhyme you will get is with 11, and after that you don't get another one until million, billion, trillion.
I mean, you, you could say that 21 rhymes with 1 or 31 rhymes with 21, but I think that's fudging it a little bit.
That's more of an identity than a full rhyme. Um, so counting is a list and also an incantation and counting out.
Rhymes are an ancient and common genre of nursery rhyme, as in this classic one to buckle my shoe.
Three, four. Shut the door. Five, six.
Pick up sticks seven, eight. Lay them straight nine, ten.
A big fat hen.
Um, it's really fun to say, and it's also kind of interesting metrically and would be what I would call a dolnick, but that is for another time.
Um, so counting matches a list of number words with some sort of countable items.
So I would say the poetry and counting numbers sprang perhaps from much the same source.
Numbers and counting are entangled with lists.
A list often has numbers. A grocery list might involve two sticks of butter, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, a six pack of beer.
And of course, lists are right there at the beginning of the Western canon and the epic catalogue as the Iliad Catalogue of Ships,
where we find out that the oceans sent 50 ships equipped with 120 youths each.
So there's a math problem right there. Um, the minions. 30, the Athenians, 50, the Cretans 80, the Myrmidons 50, and so on.
A tremendous show of force. Um, the Odyssey is less obvious in its catalogue, perhaps, but we do have the inherent math problem of Penelope's suitors.
57, from Dulcie.
Um, 23 from Sammi, 44 from Zakynthos, 12 from Ithaca and then an assortment of hangers on that you're not sure whether to count or not.
Um, this image, by the way, is, uh, recently all over, um, social media.
And these are linear B tablets from Pylos, um, that show lists of items needed for sacrifice.
So certain number of oxen and, um, tables and wine and so on.
In Simon Armitage's version of the Odyssey, we have a charming bit of counting folklore and counting out rhyme in book nine, in the Cyclops cave.
Um, the Cyclops, though this is also was recently on social media everywhere, which is a fragment of the Iliad.
Um, papyrus in The Mummy and people like, why would you have this fragment of book two, the book of the Catalogue of Ships?
But I'm, I'm big into lists. So I think it's a cool thing to be buried with.
Um, and Simon Armitage, his version of the Odyssey.
We have a charming bit of counting folklore. The cyclops, blinded, is letting out his use in lambs and rams, and weathers out of the cave.
The last ram, his favourite has Odysseus tied up underneath to escape the cave, and we get a very sweet address to his favourite Ram,
who is last out when he is usually the first to lead the flock out to pasture.
Um, disappointingly, if you're trying to compare the passages, there is no counting.
In the Greek. The ram is just last, but Armitage inserts, um, some Yorkshire counting here.
Then they ambled forward, tottered over the stone floor,
bleated to be let out of the cave for water and pasture, and Cyclops, even with a smoking hole instead of an.
I was still a shepherd at heart.
So he rolled away the rock, open the mouth of the cave and counted them out, stroking their backs as they wandered into the light.
Mother tether mints. Hither. Leather.
Amber. Denver, the ignorant swine.
He released them one at a time.
Yan Tan tether is a sheep counting system traditionally used by shepherds in Yorkshire, and it's also used for knitting and counting stitches.
The knitting song is known as the lantern tether mother myth.
Um, so I like that in a way. Um, both on the Odysseus side and on the Penelope side of counting stitches.
Um, they could both be using some kind of ancient rhyme.
And of course, we think of even going to sleep as counting sheep. So, again, this very ancient entanglement.
To know the number of something. Odysseus learning the number of his enemies, for instance, is to gain some sort of power over it.
And numbering in the ancient world can be related to spells and curses.
That's how many. But how much is also a lover's question.
Catullus combines these lover's problems in one of his most famous and translated poems, um.
Catullus was the Latin poet of the late Roman Republic, who is part of the Neoteric school, a sort of ancient avant garde.
Many of his poems are love poems and addressed to a woman he calls lesbian,
who is usually identified with Claudia martelli, a sophisticated, well-versed married woman.
Um. Many of these poems are in Hindi, a syllabic and 11 syllable line, um,
which I would sort of roughly scan is something like bam, bam, bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam.
We wow, I must smell SB Aqua mammoths.
Um, and this is my very fast and loose, um, translation that I did just the other day, so it hasn't really been fine tuned,
but, um, we'll give you a kind of an idea of the counting and, uh, counting that is going on.
Let us live, my lesbian and love, and let us estimate the title of Judgy Old geezers as not worth a dime.
Sons can set. They rise again on time. But we when, once we douse our little light.
Must sleep for one interminable night. Give me a thousand smooches.
Then another hundred, then a thousand more. Than smother them in 100 scads on scads.
So many will shake the final tally up, lest any who and can hold us to account and curse our kisses, knowing the amount.
Um. So there are lots of number words here, and there's also a lot of money imagery going on.
Um, Catullus talks about himself as being one of these poor poets.
Maybe he's a temp. I'm not sure. But, um, he has, you know, a pocket that's just full of cobwebs.
Um, and there's this initial idea of estimating, um, the rumours of the severe old man as worth an ass.
An ass is a small, worthless sort of bronze coin.
Um, when he comes to. And we have this idea of one one night that will last forever.
And a brief, short light. Um, so there's a lot of measuring and comparing.
We get two kisses. Give me a thousand kisses.
Um, this is not the usual word for kisses in Latin.
A kiss in Latin usually would be Oscar alum. Um, but instead we have this vernacular, which is why I've translated that as smooches.
Um, and this has got more of a sort of labial plosive kissy noise to it.
Vasya, um, also, you might think in a way, perhaps, um, all of these kisses contain little ass's little coins.
There's an ass in Basia. Um, so we have a thousand, then a hundred, then another thousand, then another hundred, and so on.
Um, and finally we get to this verb contour.
Con contour. Bobby Musse. Um, con turbo means to shake things up.
Um, it also means, I think, to go bankrupt. Um, so there's this idea of there being so many kisses.
We scramble the accounts, and that way nobody can list them and number them and therefore curses.
Um, there's a 1941 article, um, which suggests that this cone turbo verb has to do with the abacus.
I really I'm very fond of this idea, I think, partly because I just like the word abacus.
Abacus is a wonderful word to say, um, and etymological in theory comes from Greek,
but it actually comes from a Semitic source, um, having to do with sand or dust,
because the abacus was originally, um, a flat table with sand or dust, and you would have pebbles,
or maybe you just draw on the sand in ways that you could make up the amount.
So I kind of am attracted to that. Um. This is a translation by Isobel Williams from her delightful switch The Complete Catullus.
These are very, very, very free translations, but they're kind of engage with the poems in unusual ways.
I love that she calls five the Song of Snogs instead of the Song of Songs.
Um, open out to life and love with me, Claudia, and we'll set the regulators hisses at the lowest rate of interest.
Suns go down and dance will come. But once our pinprick light is out, the night will never be for more than sleeping.
I love doing this. Let's take a long position. Swell the abacus with kisses.
And here you can hear an English abacus contains kisses.
So that's maybe something extra that Catullus doesn't have access to.
Now, I'm not really sure how to read this bit out. I like the idea that x we think of kisses as x x x.
Maybe it's also like x rated here. Um, but that x also looks a lot like a like a Latin ten.
Um M stands for thousand, C for 100. Um, it also sort of brings to light maybe that if we do think this is Claudia martelli,
um, these Latin initials for numbers also associate with her name.
Um, Catullus seven kind of answers this. You ask how many kisses, and we get the idea of as many as the sand in the desert, which again,
if this were an abacus, would be kind of attractive because you would already have sand in the mix.
Would classicists recognise the poem if I just gave them this?
Maybe. Do you recognise this poem?
Latin and Greek poetry contain various numbers, lists, calculations.
Calculus is a small pebble used in calculating and even algebra problems.
Um. The Greek Anthology has a whole chapter 14 devoted to math problems,
including an algebra problem about a tombstone of a mathematician where you have to work out, um, how old he died at.
Um, but we perhaps we might think of this as a verse inside textbook rather than poetry with a capital P,
um, a housman poet, most famously of the 1896 A Shropshire Lad.
And, as Auden described him in a sonnet,
the Latin scholar of his generation famously characterised the Latin poet Manlius in the preface to his second volume edition of the poet's work,
as exercising an eminent aptitude for doing sums in verse, which is the brightest facet of his genius,
that often gets kind of misquoted and tumbled around, so that it looks like Houseman is really dissing Manlius.
Um, but giving Houseman s own predilection for sums in verse and his lifelong interest in astronomy.
I don't think that adds up. Um, that poem that is obviously loveliest of trees.
I don't know if anyone had figured that out. Anyone forget that one loveliest of trees.
Loveliest of trees. The cherry now is hung with bloom about the bow and stands about the woodland ride wearing white for Easter tide.
Now of my threescore years and 1020 will not come again and take from 70 springs a score.
It only leaves me 50 more and sense to look at things in bloom.
50 springs our little room about the woodlands.
I will go to see the cherry hung with snow.
So this is one of the most widely anthologised poems in the language and one of the most beloved.
And it is doing sums in verse. Um, there is a biblical reference.
Um, the days of our years are threescore years and 1020 plus 20 plus 20 plus ten.
Um, so this is supposed to be the standard given lifespan of the human being.
Other things, um, being beside the case, the character who speaks this poem is Terence Hearsay, the eponymous Shropshire lad of the book.
And we learn here that he is 20 years old. Maybe even he has just turned 20 years old.
But Houseman was in his late 30s and in an urban environment in London when he wrote this, working as a clerk in a patent office.
And what seemed at first blush, what seems at first blush, the Poem of a Young Man is a meditation from the prospect of middle age.
And perhaps that adds to the calculations and the subtractions here.
Um, I suspect that your average 20 year old might think of 50 springs to look at cherry blossoms in bloom a lot.
Um, but again, the poet's perspective may foreshortened this time.
The point is that beauty requires an eternity to complement contemplated.
And by a neat trick, the white blossoms of spring by a sleight of metaphor,
are already foreclosed on by winter, and perhaps even one eternal night by the end of the poem.
There can be a pleasure and a wit in mathematic operations, in poems.
And again, numbers are often rhetorical, maybe even always rhetorical.
In poetry, birthday poems, of which perhaps loveliest of trees is maybe even arguably a species naturally offered play for numbers.
I had to include this one by Jonathan Swift. Um, who from this poem on Saint Stella.
Who is Miss Hester Johnson? A birthday verse every year until her death.
As she was born in 1681, she would have been 38 at the time of this poem.
But where? And that's not going to bother us. 34 is required here for the math.
Um, the nature of their relationship was unclear, and they may have had a secret marriage.
He met her first when she was eight and then when she was 15 or 16.
And in 1696, when he met her as a teenager, he declared her the most beautiful, graceful and agreeable young woman in London.
So this is Stella's birthday, March 13th, 1719.
Stella, this day is 34. We shan't dispute a year or more.
However, Stella, be not troubled. Although thy size and years are doubled.
Since first I saw thee at 16. The brightest virgin on the green.
So little is thy form declined. Made up so largely in thy mind I would.
It pleased the gods to split thy beauty. Sighs.
And years and wit. No age could furnish out a pair of nymphs.
So graceful, wise and fair. With half the lustre of your eyes.
With half your wit, your years and sighs.
And then before it grew too late. How should I beg of gentle fate.
That either nymph might have her swain to split my worship?
Two in in twain. And you can see all of these number words 34 a year or more.
Doubled 16. Little. Largely. Split pair.
Half, half. Um. Split in twain. Now, I personally, I don't think I would be thrilled to get this poem.
It is very charming and very affectionate, but the sort of constant repetition of sighs gives me pause.
Um, so as we can see, numbers and mathematical operations in poems can be used for precision, level,
specificity and detail verisimilitude for magical charms, powers, spells, curses for rhetorical proofs, arguments,
and persuasion as a natural and essential element of narrative for analogies, metaphors, vocabulary, puns, wordplay,
and tropes for building poetic structures and stanzas, for delayed gratification and the pleasure of deduction.
Realisation for counting, accounting and demonstrating what or who counts.
In terms of specificity. I think the locus classic classic US is La Belle dumb son Mercy by John Keats.
Um, you know, Ezra Pound famously warned the poets to go in fear of abstraction, and we may think of numbers themselves as a kind of abstraction.
Pure numbers may are. But numbers applied to countable objects or actions are precise details.
Nothing could be less abstract and more particular, giving a reading a texture of reality and for simulated.
Um. This is perhaps one of the most famous examples. The poem is still so fresh from his pen that he revises it as he copies it out.
It first appears in a letter to his brother, uh, George and his sister in law, Georgina, who have settled in Kentucky.
And, um, this letter is from April of 1819.
I won't read the whole poem, but we'll read some of it. Um.
Oh, what can ail the night at arms alone and pale loitering.
The sedge has withered from the lake. And no birds sing.
I see a lily on thy brow. With anguish moist and fever dew.
And on thy cheeks a fading rose. Fast with withering.
Two I met a lady in the meads. Full beautiful a fairy's child.
Her hair was long, her foot was light and her eyes were wild.
I made a Garland for her head and bracelets too. And fragrant zone.
She looked at me as she did love and made sweet moon.
I set her on my pacing steed and nothing else. All day long for side long would she bend and sing a fairy song.
She found me roots of relish. Sweet and honey, wild and manju and sure and language strange.
She said I love the true. She took me to her elfin grotto.
And there she wept and sighed. Full sore.
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes with kisses for.
In the letter with the poem, Keats immediately addresses the numerical detail.
Um, so right after the poem he says, why? For kisses, you will say.
Why four? Four because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my muse.
She would have fain said, score without hurting the rhyme.
But we must temper the imagination, as the critics say, with judgement.
I am obliged to choose an even number that both eyes might have fair play, and to speak truly, I think, to a piece quite sufficient.
Suppose I had said seven. There would have been three and a half apiece, a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side.
So you can see all of these. It is playing with numbers even in the letter for kisses.
Score even numbers. Both eyes. Two apiece.
Seven. Three and a half. Um. Quite charming. Um.
He was wildly revising even as he was writing it down.
And you can see some crossing out in the manuscript.
Um, and you can see that the stanza with the four is one of the stanzas that he has, has sort of been thinking about or having second thoughts about.
Um, and it is certainly one of the most memorable details of the poem.
But he immediately, despite this justification, had second thoughts.
And when the poem goes to publication, where is yeah, know when the poem goes to publication?
He ditches four altogether, and in fact, he ditches the entire rhyme pair so he doesn't put in a score either.
He just takes out this detail altogether. She took me to her elfin grot.
And there she gazed and sighed deep. And there I shut her wild, sad eyes, so kissed to sleep.
No one, I think, considers this an improvement. And usually, um, you know, when you see it in anthologies, you see the 1819 version.
We miss the strange specificity of four, the doubling of two for the two eyes,
which is not some typical fairy tale thrice, and which grounds this fairy story in some kind of uncanny reality.
Um, it is certainly one of the most memorable details of the poem, as I said, and is even an occasion for this poem.
Parody response by Robert Service.
Um. Sometimes known as the Canadian Kipling. What kisses had John Keats?
I scanned two lines, with some surmise as over Keats I chanced to pour, and there I shut her wild, wild eyes with kisses, for says I.
Why was it only four? Not 5 or 6 or seven?
I think I would have made it more even 11.
Gee, if she'd lured a guy like me into her jellied grot, I'd make sure that Beldum saw in mercy sure kiss a lot.
Then poets have their little tricks. I think John counted kisses for not 2 or 3 or 5 or 6 to rhyme with sort.
Um, so in a sense, I, you know, I kind of agree.
I think it is there to rhyme with sort and that gives its reason, and that doesn't undermine the fact that it's still the better choice.
Ballads like numbers, they like counting.
Um, uh, this is, you know, weirdly, I, they kind of go together.
It doesn't seem like they would, but they do the very famous poem, um, by William Wordsworth.
We are seven. It's a poem about counting, about who counts, um, and about, um, who does who.
Where's my okay, uh, about who counts? Um, who does the counting?
As with most poems centred in some ways on numbers, there is a superabundance of numbers in the poem,
not just the essential ones for the numerical problem, which is one of addition and subtraction.
We are seven, a simple child that lightly draws its breath and feels its life in every limb.
What should it know of death? I met a little cottage girl.
She was eight years old. She said. Her hair was thick with many a curl that clustered round her head.
She had a rustic woodland air and she was wildly clad.
These kind of remind me a little bit of the fairy. Her eyes were fair and very fair.
Her beauty made me glad. Sisters and brothers, little maid, how many may you be?
How many? Seven and all, she said, and wondering, looked at me.
And where are they? I pray you tell, she answered.
Seven or we and two of us at Cornwall, and two are gone to see two of us in the churchyard lie my sister and my brother,
and in the churchyard cottage I dwelled near them with my mother.
You say that two at Conway dwell, and two are gone to see yet.
Year seven, I pray you tell sweet maid how this may be.
Um. You round about my little maid. Your limbs, they are alive.
If two are in the churchyard, lay then here only five. Their graves are green.
They may be seen. Um. She talks about often after sunset, sir, when it is light and fair, I take my little poor ginger and eat my supper there.
The first that died was Sister Jane. In bed.
She moaning lay till God released her of her pain.
And then she went away. So in the churchyard she was laid.
And when the grass was dry together round her grave we played.
My brother John and I. And when the ground was white with snow.
And I could run and slide. My brother John was forced to go.
And he lies by her side. How many are you, then, said I, if they two are in heaven.
Quick, was the little maids reply. Oh, master, we are seven, but they are dead.
Those two are dead. Their spirits are in heaven to us, throwing words away.
For still the little maid would have her will, and said, nay, we are seven.
I actually find this a very creepy poem. I mean, if you were to sort of dramatise it or whatever, it could be the beginning of a horror film.
Um, you know, this beautiful child, um, talking about her dead siblings.
Um, it's also kind of strange. I think that the first thing that the speaker asks the child is, how many are you?
Not what is your name? You know, it's it's odd to me.
So the little girl we are informed is eight years old. Um, ask how many children are in her family.
She says they're seven. Two in Conway, two at sea and two in the churchyard.
And then there is, of course, herself. Two plus two plus two plus one is seven.
The essence of the poem, though, is the speaker's refusal to count the dead with the living.
And so he arrives at a different sum. Two plus two plus one.
So five, or else seven, minus two and thus five.
But the girl who has something rather uncanny about her, she's alive.
But according to the poem, but seems to live between this world and the next,
and has something of a fairy wildness to her, refuses to not include her sister Jane and her dead brother John.
In fact, Jane and John are the only two individuals named in the poem.
They are the children besides the little girl most vividly evoked, and they are the focus of her solicitude.
She sings to them and keeps them company when she eats. The rhymes on the specific numbers govern some of the direction of the poem.
Five and alive seven and Heaven and the ballad form again, is one that likes to enumerate specific cardinal numbers,
whether as persuasive rhetorical detail or along with ordinal numbers, as essential narrative elements.
Um, ballads do kind of. They are attracted to numbers.
I mean, even if you think of something like a song like The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot,
um, it's just full of numbers, and it sounds like it's a sort of legendary song.
It's a legend, and it sounds long ago, but the wreck, which was a real ship, um, was wrecked in 1975, and the song only comes out in 1976.
So you have things like with a load of iron ore, 26,000 tons more.
Um, you have, you know, they, they made Whitefish Bay if they'd put 15 more miles behind her.
But of course, the critical number comes at the end of the song in a musty old hall in Detroit.
They prayed in the Maritime Sailors Cathedral.
The cathedral bell chimed till it rang 29 times for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald, and the specificity of 29,
not 30, which would scan better, nor scores or many of some such meaning that each lost soul counts.
And it is the actual number of crew members who died in that wreck.
Now, here we have you. Operations, um,
whether of addition or subtraction or multiplication or division in poems have a way of delaying some kind of recognition or realisation for a moment,
while the sounds of the poem wash over you so that the wisdom arrives a second or two later,
and the second wave of knowledge, um, is pleasurable, even if it's in a melancholy, spooky, shivery way.
Um, this is one of my just very favourite lines from a song.
Um, Hank Williams senior Long Gone Lonesome Blues from 1950.
I'm gonna find me a river. One that's cold as ice.
And when I find me that river. Lord, I'm going to pay the price.
Oh Lord, I'm going down in it three times.
But Lord, I'm only coming up twice. I mean, it's funny and it's horrible.
And there's something about that math where you have to do the subtraction to realise the suicidal intent of the speaker.
Um, this is another ballad. Uh, it's a living poet, Alan Shapiro, I think he lives in North Carolina.
I came across this in a Best American Poetry volume.
Um, it doesn't look like it has a lot of numbers, but what it has is a lot of multiplication and division in it.
Country Western singer. So it's about an alcoholic, um, country western singer.
I mean, it could be Hank Williams, in fact. Um, but, uh, and it's got a lot of the tropes of a country western song.
So there's some, like, terrible, um, metaphors and so on, but it's also kind of moving in its way.
I used to feel like a new man after the day's first brew, but then that new man I became would need a tall one, too,
as would the new man he became and the new one after him, and so on and so forth, till the new man made the dizzy room go dim.
And each one said, I'll be your muse. I'll trade you song for beer.
He said, I'll be your salt lick, honey, if you will be my dear.
He said, I'll be your happy hour. And you, boy, you'll be mine.
And mine won't end at 6 or 7. Or even at closing time.
Yes, son. I'll be your spirit guide. I'll lead you to absolute, to Dewar's, Bushmills and Jameson's, then down to Old Tangle Foot.
And they all drained the pretence from you that propped you up so high.
I'll teach you salvation's just salvation.
Without the I to hear his sweet talk.
Was to think he'd gone from rags to riches. Till going from drink to drink.
Became like going from hags to [INAUDIBLE]. Like going from bed to barroom stool.
From stool to bathroom stall from stall to sink, from sink to stool, from stool to hospital.
Now the monitors beep like pinball machines and coldly the I.V. drips, and a nurse runs a moistened washcloth over my parched and bleeding lips.
And the blood I taste. The blood I swallow is as far away from wine as 510 is for the one who dies at 509.
So that little extra subtraction problem, that is the difference one minute.
The difference of eternity. Um, allergies and tombstone's are, as we saw in the Greek anthology poem on the mathematician.
A place for numbers as well as words. We expect to see a name and the death dates, a life.
Parentheses. Poems about death like birthday poems gravitate to the numerical.
Let's consider this widely anthologised piece by Seamus Heaney.
Mid-term break. I sat all morning in the college sickbay, counting bells, nailing classes to a close.
At 2:00 our neighbours drove me home. In the porch, I met my father crying.
He had always taken funerals in his stride and Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram.
When I came in, and I was embarrassed by old man standing up to shake my hand and tell me they were sorry for my trouble, whispers informed strangers.
I was the eldest, away at school, as my mother held my hand in hers and coughed out angry Tearless sighs.
At 10:00 the ambulance arrived with the corpse staunched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops and candles soothed the bedside.
I saw him for the first time in six weeks, paler now, wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple.
He lay in the four foot box, as in his cot. No gaudy scars.
The bumper knocked him clear, a four foot box a foot for every year.
Numbers and operations with numbers often represent in poems anyway, or rather enact a dawning of reality to the speaker of the poem.
Sometimes an out of body sort of numbness and detachment, and sometimes a realisation of a fact that can be described but not absorbed.
In shock the mind struggles to take the measure of things.
This is what is going on, I think, in Heaney's mid-term break, various kinds of measurement and accounting are in play from the get go.
Um, even the title mid-term break, which seem straightforward enough.
A break from school gains weight and meaning in this like mid is to bisect something.
Term is an ending point. Time hangs heavy.
About the poem. The beginning all morning. A vague but intelligible unit of time grows grave with wordplay.
In the second line we begin counting with the nailing of bells.
There's the specific to a clock that points the speaker in a particular moment, but with journalistic precision.
As the speaker looks on from outside himself and measurements begin,
and analogies with the human body astride or a step can be a measure of distance, a hand, a measure of height.
These are perhaps less obviously felt here as measurements, but I do feel them ever so faintly.
10:00 is another journalistic marker as the ambulance arrived punctually but in no haste.
Next morning ties us back to all morning, even snowdrops.
Not at first. Anything to do with numbers are, or mathematics are a specific marker of time and the final analogical calendar of the natural world.
The four foot measurement of the small box for is again an oddly poetic number,
not magically odd like three, nor prime, but small specific human with a long, sorrowful O.
It prepares us for the body of a child, but somehow not for the gut punch of the math problem at the end, the answer to which is the child's age.
Again, it is somehow the slight delay of our working out of the answer that that's information that arrives a second after the poem itself has ended,
that sets the sad echoes resonating in the mind.
I would be remiss not to at least mention or talk about a little bit with poetry and numbers.
Marion Moore's syllabic stanzas more dispenses with feet altogether, and instead we get nubby,
tangible syllables that we count like to tell us as syllables on our fingers, on our hand.
Abacus. Some people complain that we can't hear syllables in English, to which I might say, unheard melodies are sweeter.
But I might also quote Leibnitz. Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
And I do think that even if people think they can't hear syllabic, still some part of your brain is doing the counting and does hear the structure.
Moore has talked about, you know, how she arrives at these stanzas.
They seem to be ad hoc. I have written that any stanza is a matter of expediency, hit upon as being approximately suitable to the subject.
I like this approximate idea. Um, she talks about, um.
I don't plan a stanza. Words cluster like chromosomes determining the procedure.
Um, I may influence an arrangement or thin it and then try to make a successive stanza identical with the first.
Um, this is the paper. Nonetheless, like many animal poems of Moore's, it's partly, maybe an ars poetica, maybe a feminist one.
It's pregnant with ideas of motherhood as well as writer hood.
Although, of course, Moore famously had a fraught relationship with her mother.
Um, but first and foremost is an exquisite description of this strange creature whose paper fragile shell
is ultimately likened to ancient and long surviving classical structures of bronze and marble.
Um, so I've listed the numbers. I don't know why it hasn't come out very well in my slides, but, you know,
for authorities whose hopes are shaped by mercenaries writers and trapped by tea time fame and by computers, uh, computers, Comfort's not for these.
The paper Nautilus constructs her thin paper, her thin glass shell,
giving her perishable souvenir of hope a dull white outside and small edged inner surface,
glossy as the sea, the watchful maker of it guards at night and day and night.
She scarcely eats until the eggs are hatched, buried eight fold in her eight arms, for she is in a sense a devil fish.
Her glass ram's horn cradled. Freight is hid, but is not crushed, as Hercules, bitten by a crab loyal to the Hydra, was hindered to succeed.
The intensively watched eggs coming from the shell free it when they are freed, leaving its wasp nest.
Floors of white and white and close laid Ionic kitten folds, like the lines in the main of a Parthenon horse,
round which the arms had wound themselves as if they knew love is the only fortress strong enough to trust you.
The Nautilus is actually. It's a kind of octopus. The paper Nautilus.
This is. You can see here the description is wonderful, where she just talks about the pleading,
um, as if it's like the pleading of a ionic kitten or the Maine of a Parthenon horse.
Um, these are very, very precise and accurate. As for the structure itself, what it's doing, I mean, it has that it has an organic feel.
It feels pleated to me that seven, seven, five, five, eight is interesting.
Again, it's an octopus with eight arms.
And there's a a point where we go from odd numbers of syllables to eight, five, eight is a sort of Fibonacci sequence, um, set of numbers.
And then we go into sixes. She breaks the pattern. It's one point, um, here by a crab loyal to the Hydra.
I think she didn't want to have a the hanging out there at the end of the line, and she simply changed the rules.
Maybe it has more important than that, but, um, I'm willing to sort of say that she was doing this in an ad hoc fashion.
Um, but there's still a very kind of nubby feel to the syllabic.
So they have that feeling of counting.
In some ways they feel organic, the way the structure of this is a kind of Fibonacci, um, curve by its natural, but it's also mathematical.
When totting up Marion Moore's stanzas, I tied up on my fingers.
And in fact, if you see someone mouthing words to themselves and doing this, they are probably a poet.
Um, and here's a poem that engages directly with mental arithmetic and with finger counting.
And Emily Dickinson has lots and lots of number and sciencey poems.
Um, her education at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke emphasised, unusually for the time, for either boys or girls, natural sciences.
She was required to memorise and recite scientific texts.
She writes um to her brother. Um, when she's 17.
I finished my examination in Euclid. My studies are chemistry, physiology, a quarter course in algebra.
She wrote to a friend saying she was studying algebra, Euclid, ecclesiastical history, and reviewing arithmetic.
Again, to be on the safe side because Mount Holyoke really emphasised being quick with mental arithmetic.
So we have a bit of that here. Um, this poem uses cipher for zero.
She sometimes also uses the word zero. Um, her poem about the snake, a narrow fellow in the grass.
And, um, I never meet that fellow attended or alone without a tighter breathing and zero at the bone.
Um, the zero there having to do with the thermometer. But here she uses the more multivalent term cipher.
Um, and for a cipher also. So, teens, one by one,
the father counts and then attract between set cipher lists to teach the I the value of its ten until the peevish student acquire the quick of skill.
The numerals are dower to back adorning all the rule.
Tis mostly slate and pencil. And darkness on the school distracts the children's fingers.
Still the eternal rule regards least cipher.
Like with leader of the band and every separate urchins.
Some is fashioned for his hand.
There's a variation. Sometimes he adds these little plus and the manuscripts where she's thinking about maybe changing something.
And so her manuscripts are littered with these kind of mathematical symbols, even if they aren't being used in that way.
Um, so we have the idea of counting on our fingers. Um, the cipher.
I love the word cipher. Um, partly it could be a zero, but it also has the sense of being a puzzle or of being a person of no account.
Um, and in a textbook that she would have perhaps looked at Benjamin Greenleaf.
Um, there's also, I think, a little bit of religious language here, although the cipher has no value of itself when standing alone,
yet being joined to the right hand of significant figures, it increases their value in a tenfold proportion.
And, um, I really love how the ten fingers and up are fashioned for his hand.
Every separate church and some the idea that every single individual is of value and counts.
I think even though I can't completely decipher this poem, um, it's this idea of equality seems to be strongly within it.
And I think to this idea of counting in a religious sense, which perhaps is maybe at the background.
I also the idea of God numbering and and caring and counting.
Um, this passage from Matthew is one that springs to mind.
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?
And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your father's will, but the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
Do not fear. Therefore you are of more value than many sparrows.
And if we look at the Greek, we might notice that the coin,
the little nobody knows really how to translate this penny farthing, whatever is again that ass.
It's the same coin that Catullus is using and Assyrian.
There can be a numbness in the centre of numbers when we speak of human beings as statistics, particularly in man made disasters such as war.
The perpetrators of violence in a time of AI and drones are increasingly insulated and isolated from the human cost,
the moral accounting of their calculations and weaponry.
Yehuda Amichai, um, born in Germany to an Orthodox Jewish family, migrated to Mandate Palestine at the age of 11 and 1935.
He later served in the British Army in World War Two, and in an assortment of conflicts in the IDF.
He is a soldier, poet, a war poet in the sense I think, that Wilfred Owen is one who understands the cost of conflict.
As bombs continue to fall on Gaza and Ukraine, on fishing boats in the Caribbean and Tel Aviv, on Turan and civilians pay the price.
I think often of this poem, which is one not only of numbers and counting and mathematics, but of geometry, taking the measure of the world,
and uses the cool language of measurement and counting, not to dehumanise, but to focus and particular eyes.
I find it devastating and ever topical.
I should say I have no Hebrew whatsoever, and I am given to understand that Amichai is Hebrew is particularly rich in untranslatable wordplay.
He says of his Hebrew, I grew up in a very religious household, so the prayers,
the language of prayer itself became a kind of natural language for me.
I've looked at a few translations of this poem.
I, I went with this one, um, because the poet himself cooperated with Ted Hughes to produce this, this version.
So perhaps it is a more accurate version. I couldn't say the diameter of the bomb.
The diameter of the bomb was 37cm, and the diameter of its effective range about seven metres.
And in it four dead and 11 wounded, and around them in a greater circle of pain and time are scattered.
Two hospitals and one cemetery. But the young woman who was buried where she came from, over 100km away, enlarges the circle greatly,
and the lone man who weeps over her death in a far corner of a distant country, includes the whole world in the circle.
And I won't speak at all about the crying of orphans that reaches to the seat of God,
and from there onward, making the circle without end and without God.
The circle, we might say, is a cipher. Both nothing and everything.
I think of that last image in that last image.
Mean is engaging with the notion of God as a sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere,
but it is inverted in the blast of the bomb.
And again we see lots and lots of number words, um, and again geometry now, as well as addition and subtraction.
Um, one of the things when I'm working on one of these talks is suddenly the talk starts to talk back to me and wherever I go.
Um, there I was, just in the Westgate library, and this was on special display, speaking to me.
One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a wedding, four for death.
Five for silver, six for gold. Seven for a secret never to be told.
It's an ancient nursery rhyme. And a counting out rhyme. And a kind of augury by magpies.
And a reminder that poetry and numbers, counting and charms have been entangled for as long as we have had language.
I will end with a counting out rhyme that has no numbers at all.
Counting out rhyme by Edna Saint Vincent Millay. Silver bark a beach and sallow bark of yellow birch and yellow twig of willow.
Stripe of green and moosewood maple.
Colour seen and leaf of apple. Bark of purple.
Wood of purple, pale as moonbeam.
Wood of oak for yolk and barn beam.
Wood of hornbeam, silver bark of beach and hollow stem of elder, tall and yellow twig of willow.
What is it? Counting. What counts? These are questions.
Problems. Maybe they will only become more urgent with time and climate, with nations at war with one another and man with the natural world.
We live in a time of subtractions and division of ciphers and sums.
Maybe poetry can be a kind of algebra, wrestling with the problem of solving for what is missing.
Mending what is broken. Take.