Premature and tiny With father passed away Baby Isaac Newton Was born on Christmas Day The year was 16-42 Place: a farm in Lincolnshire And only 3 years later too Would Isaac lose his mother She remarried, moved away Came back 8 years later A wealthy, cold widow He had cause to hate her In those years abandoned Isaac lived a life lonely Getting from his grandmother Clothes, food, and board only A single word of warmth For her, he never penned When came her funeral He did not attend And though he went to schools Walking miles through fields, alone The sober, silent Isaac Had no friends there, it is known Carvings that he made though Show Isaac’s mind was keen Birds, beasts, and windmills At his home can still be seen As for his reunion With the one who gave him birth She brought her new children Still gave Isaac little worth To Grantham grammar school She sent him swift away With an apothecary William Clarke he did stay Chemicals all around He explored Alchemy In Isaac’s attic workshop Clarke allowed him liberty He even built a windmill Powered by a miller mouse And the only girl he loved Isaac met in that house Close friends that they were From all the pain he carried He could not make more of it Isaac never married But at age 16 His mother dragged him back To become a grazier A job for which he had no knack Hiding beneath hedges Isaac much preferred to read As his sheep ran amok On neighbour fields to feed Fighting for his return Was Henry Stokes, thankfully This fatherlike Headmaster Made Isaac’s board and schooling free For the man well knew Just how myzer-lee When it came to Isaac Could his mother be Stokes supported Isaac to Cambridge University But to go he’d have to serve Students more wealthy For though his mother had The means to fund her son Her refusal meant he’d not Enter as a Gentleman Would have to wait on tables Cleaning boots and latrines Mocked, without a single doubt By lesser minds, with greater means Then in 16-65 Through the land, schools were closed Students were sent home, so they To plague might not be exposed Isaac, now aged 23 Starts a solitary 18 months of work And discovery Using a prism White light, he would show Was not ‘pure’ as thought But made of a rainbow Mathematics new Isaac would invent also We call it Calculus And from that would grow The Three Laws of Motion Telling why and how things move And proof that force of Gravity Acted Universally Fruit falling from a tree May have been involved But Isaac’s true brilliance Was that his equations solved That which up till then Was just theory Matching observations to His mathematics, perfectly After the plague ended, he re-entered university And was soon elected to The Royal Society For his new invention of The Reflecting Telescope But for Isaac’s work on light His pains meant he could not cope With critique that came from The senior Robert Hooke A genius, with his own scars Who for himself oft credit took So for next 20 years Isaac would retreat Work in isolation On a task discreet To turn ledd into gold And to conquer death itself Tasting mercury and worse Not great for his mental health! This alchemic dream To him mattered more Than Physics ever did But was against the Law He also scoured the Bible Thinking it corrupted though To find secret codes And believed moreso That Jesus was not God But only His son A heresy, that if found out Might have sent him to prison It was also at this time That Isaac’s mother died Yet despite all her sins He stayed firmly at her side Now it’s 16-84 Hermit Isaac gets a guest By name of Edmond Halley Who puts him to the test To prove mathematically That the force of gravity Inverse Square Law obeyed Elliptical orbits made Isaac said he did the maths Around 20 years ago But for all his cluttered works These he could not find to show So Halley asked Isaac for A most fateful favour To write the proof out again Thus came The Prin-sippia A book that’s oft regarded In Science’s history As the most important, and Crucial to modernity But for Isaac’s tale This was not the end Who fell to paranoia, and Soon drove off every friend Leaving Physics and Cambridge To save England’s currency He would join the Royal Mint And in time its Master be Not content to sit at desk He went undercover To brothels, drinking dens So as to discover Counterfeiters, conmen Utilising methods cruel To extract confessions Terror ‘came his name and tool Many lives he took, but Currency he righted And for this, not Physics He would end up Knighted In 17-27 At the age of 84 Isaac died in his sleep To rest forevermore Beside kings and queens In Westminster Abbey A giant of history Once premature and tiny Not expected to survive His mother may have wished it so Even from such soil Can a greatness grow So where we may now be And what one may come from Keep in mind the story Of Sir Isaac Newton
