[lbo-talk] Blake's "London"

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Oct 11 14:39:59 PDT 2011


I guess it's a harmless parlor game.

Lycidas? Near Perigord? To Penshurst? The Solitary Reaper?

Or this:

THE ICOSOSPHERE

"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.

Carrol

On 10/11/2011 4:02 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Oct 11, 2011, at 4:46 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>
>> Overall, I think it is the most perfect poem in the English language. I mean if there has to be one such.
>
> Keats's "To Autumn"? Byron's "So We'll Go No More A-Roving"? Lots of competition!
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



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