Meme: If you read this, post a poem in your journal.

[mothwing]

Perspectives

Mary Somerville 1780-1872

The strain of abstract thought, her father feared,
might injure her tender female frame. It did not.
It was more the needlework, the pianoforte 
at Miss Primrose’s Boarding School for Girls 
in dreary Musselburgh which fettered her spirit.
When she left, she said she felt like 
a wild animal escaped out of a cage.
Then there were the endless parties
and balls and concerts and visits –
all those ‘harmless flirtations’ bored her stiff.
The private painting lessons at least 
dealt in perspective, the Elements of Euclid, 
and Nasmyth, with his painter’s eye, saw 
that her talent was less for landscape 
than plotting how the vanishing point 
might move with the picture’s spectator.
He referred her to Leonardo, Brunelleschi.
Meanwhile she did her brother's algebra 
by the light of a hidden candle in her room.
When it had spluttered and gone out, 
she worked by the light of the moon.
Out there, the night sky seethed with riddles
and she ached to explore its perspectives, 
its vanishing points, its spectator.
What she couldn’t work out today 
she would understand in the morrow.
Soon something had to be done 
to bring about the rights of women 
to study the mechanism of the heavens, 
for example the orbit of Uranus.
What if its perturbation were caused 
by a hypothetical planet? What then?
How difficult it was to be a young lady 
and midwife to the birth of Neptune.

- Brian McCabe.