Get Your Premium Membership

Pythagoras Poems

A collection of select Pythagoras famous poems that were written by Pythagoras or written about the poet by other famous poets. PoetrySoup is a comprehensive educational resource of the greatest poems and poets on history.

Don't forget to view our Pythagoras home page with links to biographical information, articles, and more poems that may not be listed here.

See also:

by Yeats, William Butler
...y paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

 VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But thos the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts - O presences
That pas...Read more of this...



by Hardy, Thomas
...e youth, and not alien 
From enterprise, to their long last, 
Gentlemen. 

Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, 
Gentlemen, 
Pythagoras, Thucydides, 
Herodotus, and Homer,--yea, 
Clement, Augustin, Origen, 
Burnt brightlier towards their setting-day, 
Gentlemen. 

And ye, red-lipped and smooth-browed; list, 
Gentlemen; 
Much is there waits you we have missed; 
Much lore we leave you worth the knowing, 
Much, much has lain outside our ken; 
Nay, rush not: time serves: we are go...Read more of this...

by Marlowe, Christopher
...d is limited to damned souls!
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
An, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis! Were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
Unto some brutish beast! all beasts are happy,
For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live, still to be plagued in hell.
Cursed be the parents that engendered me!
No, Faustus: curse thyself; curse Lucifer
That hath deprive...Read more of this...

by Wright, James
...rd by the shoulder. One olive tree
below Grottaglie welcomes the winter into noontime shade, and
talks as softly as Pythagoras. Be still, be patient, I can hear him say,
cradling in his arms the wounded head, letting the sunlight touch
the savage face....Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...wind sighed too.
Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed
By Oisin on the grass;
There sighed amid his choir of love
Tall pythagoras.
plotinus came and looked about,
The salt-flakes on his breast,
And having stretched and yawned awhile
Lay sighing like the rest.

 II

Straddling each a dolphin's back
And steadied by a fin,
Those Innocents re-live their death,
Their wounds open again.
The ecstatic waters laugh because
Their cries are sweet and strange,
Through their ...Read more of this...



by Yeats, William Butler
...locks his eyes.
Scattered on the level grass
Or winding through the grove
plato there and Minos pass,
There stately Pythagoras
And all the choir of Love....Read more of this...

by Pythagoras,
...1. First worship the Immortal Gods, as they are established and ordained by the Law.
2. Reverence the Oath, and next the Heroes, full of goodness and light.
3. Honour likewise the Terrestrial Daemons by rendering them the worship lawfully due to them.
4. Honour likewise your parents, and those most nearly related to you.
...Read more of this...

by Blake, William
...dea; 
Moses beheld upon Mount Sinai forms of dark delusion: 

To Trismegistus. Palamabron gave an abstract Law: 
To Pythagoras Socrates & Plato. 

Times rolled on o'er all the sons of Har, time after time 
Orc on Mount Atlas howld, chain'd down with the Chain of Jealousy 
Then Oothoon hoverd over Judah & Jerusalem 
And Jesus heard her voice (a man of sorrows) he recievd 
A Gospel from wretched Theotormon. 

The human race began to wither, for the healthy built 
Se...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough,
And pressed at midnight in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured fac...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...elf the task shall be
Without reward; for thou shalt learn
The wisdom early to discern
True beauty in utility;
As great Pythagoras of yore,
Standing beside the blacksmith's door,
And hearing the hammers, as they smote
The anvils with a different note,
Stole from the varying tones, that hung
Vibrant on every iron tongue,
The secret of the sounding wire.
And formed the seven-chorded lyre.

Enough! I will not play the Seer;
I will no longer strive to ope
The mystic volum...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...et down to Peter at his prayers;
Who live on milk and meal and grass;
And once for ten long weeks I tried
Your table of Pythagoras,
- And seem'd at first "a thing enskied,"
As Shakespeare has it, airy-light
To float above the ways of men,
Then fell from that half-spiritual height
Chill'd, till I tasted flesh again
One night when earth was winter-b]ack,
And all the heavens flash'd in frost;
And on me, half-asleep, came back
That wholesome heat the blood had lost,
And set me cl...Read more of this...

by Lawrence, D. H.
...nd a keystone;
Four, and a keystone;
Four, and a keystone;
Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.

It needed Pythagoras to see life playing with counters on the living back
Of the baby tortoise;
Life establishing the first eternal mathematical tablet,
Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, but in life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise shell.

The first little mathematical gentleman
Stepping, wee mite, in his loose trousers
Under all the eternal dome of mathem...Read more of this...


Book: Shattered Sighs