University of Virginia Library

They will show you God
And all his universe in a nutshell: see!
Pinched in our little theory like a vice,
We cleave the nut with a keen hypothesis,
Whisk off the top—there 't is convenient
For logical handling. “Cannot see?” Oh, then
You have spoiled your eyes with gazing at the sun.
Hard, angular, and dry, they pish and pooh
At all ideas they cannot measure off
And pack into their iron-bound, narrow brain.
They'll not admit the existence of a truth
Which cannot be expressed in x and y,
And solved by their quadratics. Well, they serve
To show a new phenomenon in the world:
That a mind, if taken in time, can be transformed
To a machine of clockwork, cogs and wheels
Wound up with useful facts, and set away
On a shelf to go its narrow round of thought
And tell us when 't is noon or supper time,
If we get careless through abstraction. So
All men, even these, have uses. Some to go
Whirling around the circumference
Spinning out sparks into the darkling space,
While some sit staidly at the safe, slow hub
And swear there are no radii and no rim,
No winged steeds far at the chariot's pole,
No Power that rides, triumphant, terrible.
What has this new, pert century done for man,
That it affords to sneer at all before,
Because it rides its aimless jaunts by steam
And blabs its trivial talk by telegraph?
What of it? Are not babes born naked now,
As ever, and go naked from the world?
If I am the ape's cousin, what to me
Are steam and harnessed lightning, art and law?
If the night comes on so soon, what matters it
If the short day be foul or fair—if Fate
Rain thunderbolts or roses on our heads?
Yea, even 't were some satisfaction then
To stand and take the thunderbolts, and think
We are large enough at least to serve as marks
For gods to hurl at.