Lectures to Women on Physical Science Lyrics

The lamp-light falls on blackened walls

And streams through narrow perforations

The long beam trails o'er pasteboard scales

With slow-decaying oscillations

Flow current flow set the quick light-spot flying

Flow current answer light-spot flashing quivering dying

O look! how queer! how thin and clear

And thinner clearer sharper growing

The gliding fire! with central wire

The fine degrees distinctly showing

Swing magnet swing advancing and receding

Swing magnet! Answer dearest What's your final reading?

O love! you fail to read the scale

Correct to tenths of a division

To mirror heaven those eyes were given

And not for methods of precision

Break contact break set the free light-spot flying;

Break contact rest thee magnet swinging creeping dying

solo

Your liveliest motion might be reckoned

At one-tenth metre in a second

The air you said in language fine

Which scientific thought expresses

The air which with a megadyne

On each square centimetre presses

The air and I may add the ocean

Are nought but molecules in motion

Atoms you told me were discrete

Than you they could not be discreeter

Who know how many Millions meet

Within a cubic millimetre

They clash together as they fly

But you! -- you cannot tell me why

And when in tuning my guitar

The interval would not come right

This string you said is strained too far

'Tis forty dynes at least too tight!

And then you told me as I sang

What overtones were in my clang

You gabbled on but every phrase

Was stiff with scientific shoddy

The only song you deigned to praise

Was Gin a body meet a body

And even there you said collision

Was not described with due precision

In the inveriable plane

You told me lay the impulsive couple

You seized my hand you gave me pain

By torsion of a wrist so supple;

You told me what that wrench would do

'Twould set me twisting round a screw

Were every hair of every tress

(Which you no doubt imagine mine)

Drawn towards you with its breaking stress

A stress say of a megadyne

That tension I would sooner suffer

Than meet again with such a duffer!