two poems that I like

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone"
W. H. Auden, 1907-73
(from The New Faber Book of Love Poems)

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

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An observation on Sartre and Schrodinger
Alexandra Fraser
(from Our Own Kind - 100 New Zealand poems about Animals)

The cat is in the box wondering
whether he is to be
or not to be;
being or nothingness
that seems to be the question,
philosophically speaking.
He doesn't know he is a figment,
a probability, a wave function,
an idea in a physicist's mind.
He only knows there's something weird
about the box and hopes it will not be opened,
at least not yet. For it is theorised
that when an observer opens the box,
the wave function will collapse
into a cat either dead
or not dead
Without observation, the two states
are equally possible.
A very feline existential angst
that such a thing as life
depends on the lifting of a lid
and the physicist's downward gaze.

The philosopher may ask -
Does the cat watch himself?
Does he watch the timer ticking
and the canister of toxic gas,
and calculate his chances?
Nine lives remember,
but only one death.
Has the physicist considered this?
Would an answer let the cat
out of the bag?

The philosopher observes the box,
ponders possibilities.
The physicist opens the box,
strokes the cat apologetically,
offers him a saucer of milk.


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Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (I didn't know this prior to reading this poem and subsequently looking it up) was a philosopher.

Erwin Schrodinger was a theoretical physicist and 'Schrodinger's Cat' was a thought experiment devised by him in 1935.