Phi is not just the inspiration for art, architecture and design, but for poetry as well. Some poets use Fibonacci numbers in the construction of poetry. Others write poetry about phi itself. And while not exactly poetry per se, you wordsmiths might also enjoy the following anagrams:
“The Golden Ratio” has the same letters as “The God Relation.”
“The Golden Section” has the same letters as “Is to encode length.”
“Golden Mean” has the same letters as “demon angel!”
Now on to the poetry…
Fibonacci style is a non-rhyming style that uses Fibonacci numbers in the syllable count: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, …
The poem should have a minimum of six lines, but could have more. The difficulty increases for each line, as each line has the number of syllables matching the next Fibonacci number, as shown in the following example:
Inspiration Comes (Fibonacci) | |
| 1 | I |
| 1 | am |
| 2 | sitting |
| 3 | quietly, |
| 5 | listening for the |
| 8 | quiet noises in the darkness, |
| 13 | ghostly images flying between the tall pine trees, |
| 21 | illusion created by the mind, made by shadows, the brain playing tricks on itself. |
| 34 | It sits there, the raven, black as night, looking at me with its dark eyes in the dark night. Inspiration comes. Words form in my head. Evermore. |
You
write
such sense,
Benjamin,
inspirational,
your poems are teaching the romance
of golden numbers fitting seamlessly in all things,
relationships between us and our precious environment reflecting love and life.
Chilliwoman
Golden
One one two, three five eight
Sounds so simple, nothing great
Thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four
The hinges creak on an opening door
A repeating patter of the masters hand
Signing his work, the universal plan
Learn to look, the pattern’s plain to see
In the smile you flash, the dance of the honeybee
In the spirals of the pine cone and little acorn cap
In spiral arm galaxies and the ocean’s wave whitecap
In the swirl of the seashell, the air vortex of a wing
The hurricane’s eye and a thousand unseen things
Welcome to the mystery of the Greek letter phi
The measurement of beauty to the human eye
The golden ratio, one point six one eight
One, One, Two; Three, Five Eight
-Benjamin Moon
Note that the shortest line is the 6th, the longest is the 10th and the poem is 16 lines long.
If divided by two, this is a 3, 5, 8 relationship.
Aurea Mediocritas!
1.618 ad infinitum!
Never repeating, always intriguing
Fibonacci born; phi!
Golden Section behold!
Creation sequence, nature’s frequence
Mathematical phenomena; phi!
Heaven’s divine proportion!
Ancient mystery, living history
Infinite and eternal; phi!
-John Sarber
I think …
I think that I shall never see
A constant lovelier than Φ.
a+b is to a as a to b,
a ratio, gold, in harmony.
Its digits start: 1.618…,
but never ends; it is too great.
Φ is a constant, don’t despair
that it’s writ infinite; it doesn’t care.
And Φ is finite, let me explain:
’tis less than 2, no cause for pain.
It spirals onward, plain to see.
It was Mark Barr[1] who called it Φ.
Author unknown. Contributed by Comet.
Word Crunching
I
wrote
a poem
on a page
but then each line grew
To the word sum of the previous two
until I began to worry about all these words coming with such frequency
because as you can see, it can be easy to run out of space when a poem gets all Fibonacci sequency.
-Brian Bilston