Measure the days you have left. Do just that labour
which marries your heart to your right hand: simplify
your life to one emblem, a sail leaving harbour
and a sail coming in.
Derek Walcott, Omeros

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For Once, Then, Something

Robert Frost (1874–1963).

(First published in Harper’s Magazine, July 1920.)

OTHERS taunt 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.

BU Today produced a very nice video of me reading this poem as part of the Favorite Poem Project. Please take a look at the video on YouTube.

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Pebbles and marbles, like things on my mind
Seem to get lost and harder to find
When I am alone, I am inclined
If I find a pebble in sand
To think that it fell from my hand

from Pebbles and Marbles, Phish

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Academic Lineage

PhD Year		Institution
self-taught	Jean Le Rond d'Alembert
1770?	(joint) Pierre-Simon Laplace
self-taught	(joint) Joseph Lagrange
1800	Simeon Poisson	Ecole Polytechnique
1814	Michel Chasles	Ecole Polytechnique
1850	Hubert Newton	Yale
1885	Eliakim Moore	Yale
1903	Oswald Veblen	University of Chicago
1921	Philip Franklin	Princeton
1950	Alan Perlis	MIT
1969	Robert Wagner	CMU
1978	Robert Cook	Vanderbilt University
1982	Thomas LeBlanc	University of Wisconsin
1994	Mark Crovella	University of Rochester

A list of my PhD students is here.

Thanks to Paul Barford for tracing our academic lineage.

More details, including lineage back to Leibniz, are available here.

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Mark Crovella / / Since: Jun 22 1995