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Platonism Questioned by Statistics
A speaker dismisses Platonist spiritual ideals as obsolete and replaced by empirical measures. The poem contrasts religious or philosophical belief with a cold diagram
and a statistical observation — more women born than men — implying that numerical data has supplanted metaphysical consolation. The brief lines register a modern skeptical turn, using a domestic remark to show how reason and demography overwrite older, transcendent explanations.
'Those Platonists are a curse,' he said, 'God's fire upon the wane, A diagram hung there instead, More women born than men.'
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