giselle wrote: I read over Dickinson a few times but failed to come up with the 8, so now feeling puzzled ?? Please don't tell me its obvious ...

Remember I said it was kind of a cheat. The "8" in ED's poem is not a true "8", but rather a homophone. Enough said for you to find the 8?

Number 9

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
by W. B. Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Today must be a busy day; for I am alone in posting a #9. Who knows, maybe still there will be a late comer. I will post my #10. This is a poem I like very much.

The Oven Bird
By Robert Frost


There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Giselle, you're right--that is a good Styx song. I had the idea they were 80s, but it's all a blur. Saffron I thought was going to use a different Yeats. He seemed to stock his poems with a lot of numbers.

The Wild Swans at Coole

THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones 5
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount 10
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, 15
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold, 20
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water 25
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away? 30

Another that I found, in complete contrast to the Yeats...

The Temperaments

Nine adulteries, 12 liaisons, 64 fornications and
something approaching a rape
Rest nightly upon the soul of our delicate friend
Florialis,
And yet the man is so quiet and reserved in demeanour
That he passes for both bloodless and sexless.
Bastidides, on the contrary, who both talks and writes
of nothing save copulation,
Has become the father of twins,
But he accomplished this feat at some cost;
He had to be four times cuckold.

Ezra Pound

DWill wrote:Giselle, you're right--that is a good Styx song. I had the idea they were 80s, but it's all a blur. Saffron I thought was going to use a different Yeats. He seemed to stock his poems with a lot of numbers.

You are right, DWill. I had intended to use the same Yeats that you posted, but thought instead to use it for 19; 19 being a much harder number to find in a poem. That Ezra Pound is almost shocking to read, but there rings a real truth to it. It has been my experience that sometimes the person who is most vocal about sex (I think it holds for other subjects too) is sometimes the one least engaged in the activity and of course the contrary holds as well.

Saffron wrote:

giselle wrote: I read over Dickinson a few times but failed to come up with the 8, so now feeling puzzled ?? Please don't tell me its obvious ...

Remember I said it was kind of a cheat. The "8" in ED's poem is not a true "8", but rather a homophone. Enough said for you to find the 8?

Ugh, it was obvious! Guess I was looking hard for the number eight and not paying attention to the sounds of words, which isn't too smart considering this is poetry.

On Styx and 70s vs 80's , following from Wikipedia ... "Pieces of Eight is the eighth studio album and second concept album by Styx, released September 1, 1978."

Their biggest releases came earlier, like Grand Illusion. But of course they remained popular in the 80's, at least with those who didn't succumb to disco and new wave.

Love The Oven Bird. My ten is a simple poem from A.E. Housman that would be topical right now if not for a very early spring this year.
It also has the most involved arithmetic yet!

II. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now


LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten, 5
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room, 10
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Eleven is very challenging! And I almost thought I didn't have an 11 and then remember! This one has lots of numbers - as advertised by the title.


Numbers

Mary Cornish

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition--
add two cups of milk and stir--
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.

There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

I agree, Eleven is a bit challenging. Here's my 'eleven' ... found not in the words but in the meter ... does that count?

For Once, Then, Something

Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

Robert Frost

giselle wrote:I agree, Eleven is a bit challenging. Here's my 'eleven' ... found not in the words but in the meter ... does that count?

For Once, Then, Something
Robert Frost

Sure - a creative solution always works for me.