By Isabella Gallagher Rattan
Have you ever wondered how one hundred thousand billion poems can fit in a book with 10 pages, how the cycloid arch connects to Moby Dick, or how a Germain prime number finds itself in a poem? Year 12 A Level maths students heard all about this on our trip to Royal Holloway University to attend the annual McDowell lecture. This year it was presented by Professor Sarah Hart, from the University of London, who delivered a fantastic talk on Maths in literature.
She started off by explaining the strong links between Maths and poetry, particularly the structure of a poem. Obvious examples include haikus (with its 5-7-5 syllable rule) and sonnets (which employ several rhyme schemes and end with a rhyming couplet), but there are much more complex examples, such as the sestina. A sestina has 6 stanzas with six lines each and there is no rhyme scheme. Instead, the focus is on the order that the last words of each line appear in the poem. In the first stanza, those lines are in the order 123456, the second, 615243, and this continues until the 6 different words have all been at the end of each line. Here is an example of a sestina, called ‘The Guest Ellen at the Supper for Street People’ by David Ferry:
The unclean spirits cry out in the body
Or mind of the guest Ellen in a loud voice
Torment me not, and in the fury of her unclean
Hands beating the air in some kind of unending torment—
Nobody witnessing could possibly know the event
That cast upon her the spell of this enchantment.
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Almost all the guests are under some kind of enchantment:
Of being poor day after day in the same body;
Of being witness still to some obscene event;
Of listening all the time to somebody’s voice
Whispering in the ear things divine or unclean,
In the quotidian of unending torment.
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One has to keep thinking there was some source of torment,
Something that happened someplace else, unclean.
One has to keep talking in a reasonable voice
About things done, say, by a father’s body
To or upon the body of Ellen, in enchantment
Helpless, still by the unforgotten event
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Enchanted, still in the old forgotten event
A prisoner of love, filthy Ellen in her torment,
Guest Ellen in the dining hall in her body,
Hands beating the air in her enchantment,
Sitting alone, gabbling in her garbled voice
The narrative of the spirits of the unclean.
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She is wholly the possessed one of the unclean.
Maybe the spirits came from the river. The enchantment
Entered her, maybe, in the Northeast Kingdom. The torment,
A thing of the waters, gratuitous event,
Came up out of the waters and entered her body
And lived in her in torment and cried out in her voice.
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It speaks itself over and over again in her voice,
Cursing maybe or not a familiar obscene event
Or only the pure event of original enchantment
From the birth of the river waters, the pure unclean
Rising from the source of things, in a figure of torment
Seeking out Ellen, finding its home in her poor body.
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Her body witness is, so also is her voice,
Of torment coming from unknown event;
Unclean is the nature and name of the enchantment.
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If this interests you, go ahead and challenge yourself by writing a sestina! Here is a clearer example of how you should order the last words of each line:
Another fantastic example of how closely maths and poetry are interlinked is Raymond Queneau’s book, ‘Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes’, or ‘A hundred thousand billion poems’. How it works is there are ten sonnets, with each line being printed on a separate piece of card. You can move the lines around to create different sonnets, therefore there are one hundred billion different combinations of poems. But do they all make sense? We’ll never know, as it would be impossible to read all of them in one lifetime.
It’s not just poetry that forms the basis of its structure in maths, it’s also prose. The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, has a spiral structure where each of the twelve chapters is half the length of the last. This means that the first chapter is longer than the rest of the book!
Maths also crops up in literature just by mention. For example, there is a cycloid-shaped pot mentioned in Moby Dick. A cycloid is the shape formed when you pick a point on the circumference of a circle, and follow the point as it rolls across a line.
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Professor Sarah Hart was a fantastic and engaging speaker. This was definitely one of the highlights of doing Maths A Level. In addition, Royal Holloway is a beautiful university and although we didn’t look like the part of university students, we certainly felt it!