This wonderfully apropos epigram was delivered with perfect poise:
The Petty and the Small
When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.
Are overcome with gall
Klapaucius too, I ween,
To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine.
Will turn the deepest green
This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"!
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.
A poem all in g! A sonnet, trochaic hexameter, about an old cyclotron who kept sixteen artificial mistresses, blue and radioactive, had four wings, three purple pavilions, two lacquered chests, each containing exactly one thousand medallions bearing the likeness of Czar Murdicog the Headless ... (the description and the poem are unfinished, thanks to the quick intervention of Trurl.)
Grinding gleeful gears, Gerontogyron grabbed / Giggling
gynecobalt-60 golems, ...
A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Ellipse of bliss, converse, O lips divine!
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a squared cosine 2 phi!
From The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.