A Mathematico-Religious Poem

Here's a poem by Hooper Reynolds Goodwin that was published in the journal Scripta Mathematica in 1953. I liked it very much when I was a teenager, and I still think the last two lines are excellent.

PARABOLA

This curve I'm plotting? A parabola.
This point is called the focus; it's the point—
Oh, no, not an ellipse. Ellipses have two foci:
Here, I'll show you one I've drawn.
You see the difference. These two lines of the parabola,
They stretch out wide and wider,
"World without end," as preachers say.
(I don't know what they mean; perhaps they don't);
But you see how it goes.

There was a man—Sir Isaac Newton, I believe it was—
Who had the notion a parabola was an ellipse,
Its other focus at infinity.
You may not understand just what he meant;
You have to sort of take the thing on faith.
The keenest scholar can't quite picture it, you know.

I've often thought,
It might be called a symbol of man's life;
A curve of ever-widening sweep.
And here in this world
Is the focus we may call, say, temporal interests,
Food and drink and clothes . . .
But yet it cannot be that this is all;
For out beyond the reach of sight must be
Another point, a heavenly focus, see?
'Round which the sweeping curves of human life
Complete the ellipse.
Fantastic? Well, perhaps,
But yet the more I think of it...

And here—
Another thing I've often thought about:
Suppose we draw here two parabolas
With axes parallel, and let the arms cross—
"Intersect" the word is—at this point.
Now if there be a focus
Somewhere out beyond the bounds of space,
And these are two ellipses,
As Sir Isaac thought they were,
Why, don't you see, they'll intersect again
Somewhere out there.
Just as two lives that once have crossed,
Then gone their separate ways,
And one has disappeared long since into the void of death
May—but who knows? It's just a thought...

Well, come again; I don't get callers often.
They don't see much in old folks nowadays,
And when a man's not only old, but got his head
Stuck always in a book of "AnaIyt!"
Young people think I'm queer; they can't see why
A man that doesn't have to study graphs
Should plague his head; don't understand that such
Dry, dull things as a parabolic curve
May bring up mem'ries of a face that's gone.

---

The author, Hooper Reynolds Goodwin (December 5 1891-October 13 1964), was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Raised by Unitarians, he attended Boston University and was ordained as a Methodist minister. Later he became an Episcopalian minister. He served in churches in Bethel and Randolph, Vermont.

I am very grateful to his granddaughter, Sue Maltais, for providing a photo and information about his life.