A Paradoxical Ode Lyrics

My soul's an amphicheiral knot

Upon a liquid vortex wrought

By Intellect in the Unseen residing,

While thou dost like a convict sit

With marlinspikel untwisting it

Only to find my knottiness abiding;

Since all the tools for my untying

In four-dimensioned space are lying,

Where playful fancy intersperses

Whole avenues of universes;

Where Klein and Clifford fill the void

With one unbounded, finite homaloid,

Whereby the infinite is hopelessly destroyed.

But when thy Science lifts her pinions

In Speculation's wild dominions,

I treasure every dictum thou emit-tist;

While down the stream of Evolution

We drift, and look for no solution

But that of the survival of the fittest

Till in that twilight of the gods

When earth and sun are frozen clods,

When, all its energy degraded,

Matter in æther shall have faded

We, that is, all the work we've done,

As waves in æther, shall for ever run

In swift-expanding spheres, through heavens beyond the sun

Great Principle of all we see,

Thou endless Continuity!

By thee are all our angles gently rounded;

Our misfits are by thee adjusted,

And as I still in thee have trusted,

So let my methods never be confounded

O never may direct Creation

Break in upon my contemplation,

Still may the causal chain, ascending,

Appear unbroken and unending,

And, where that chain is lost to sight

Let viewless fancies guide my darkling flight

Through Æon-haunted worlds, in order infinite