Home >> Volume 2, Issue 01

Aristotle’s Complaint

William Tobias Straney

Within the mind there is a gift of thought
Of abstract dissolution of the thing,
That thinks the sphere a hole without a ring
Enclosed by circles it has somehow wrought
By being wrought of endless circles aught—
Or all but aught, for all that we might wring
From so slight, so invisible a thing
As this my sometime teacher Plato taught.
This is the secret every student sought—
To know how birds divided from the wing
And throated note know what they cannot sing:
How an empty cage is still something caught.
In eternal heavens, where endless circles thrive,
The truest circles are the ones the stars describe.