A well-known poem about Euclid and a newer parody of it!

The original poem, from 1922, on the work of the famous geometer Euclid of Alexandria (Egypt) -- circa 300 BCE. 

Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.

O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

And a continuation of the same idea, written in contemporary times by David Kramer, an editor at The Mathematical Intelligencer (and shared with his permission):

The Euclidean Domain

…Euclid alone
Has looked on beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet


Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare?
Has no one else of her seen hide or hair?
Nor heard her massive sandal set on stone?
Nor spoken with her on the telephone?


Proud poets, as you penned your paeans to Beauty,
Did you not think it was your bounden duty
(Though it were one that any might have loathed)
To tell that you have only seen her clothed?

And as you sang praise, Orpheus, of Eurydice,
Your mouth became the orifice of your idiocy!
For Beauty bare you never yet had seen,
’Twixt Hades’ depths and lofty Hippocrene.

O Beauty! Would you, for this mathematician,
Remove (if it would cause to give permission
To look on Beauty bare too great a scandal),
Once only, and then but far away, your sandal?