The value of the victor is to the value of honor in war as the value of money is to the value of righteous effort.
About the poem
The poem arrived in 2005, nearly two decades before the war in Ukraine gave it a face. It is a dark and somewhat cynical expression — it puts the victor’s worth in proportion to what the war cost and what it paid, and it declines to say which of those two is the nobler term.
It is also one half of Money Gone. Joined to The Epistle of Timo at the term they share — money — the shared term drops out and a third poem falls from the two, one neither of them contained.
The same poem, solved four ways
A similar triangles poem is a proportion, a ⁄ b = d ⁄ e, and a proportion can be rearranged without changing what it claims. Each arrangement is a separate poem and all four say the same thing.
- The Victor = (Honor in War)(Money) ⁄ Righteous Effort
- Honor in War = (The Victor)(Righteous Effort) ⁄ Money
- Money = (Righteous Effort)(The Victor) ⁄ Honor in War
- Righteous Effort = (Honor in War)(Money) ⁄ The Victor