| |
| AH, love, the teacher we decried, | |
| That erudite professor grim, | |
| In mathematics drenched and dyed, | |
| Too hastily we scouted him. | |
| He said: “The bounds of Time and Space, | 5 |
| The categories we revere, | |
| May be in quite another case | |
| In quite another sphere.” | |
| |
| He told us: “Science can conceive | |
| A race whose feeble comprehension | 10 |
| Can’t be persuaded to believe | |
| That there exists our Fourth Dimension, | |
| Whom Time and Space for ever balk; | |
| But of these beings incomplete, | |
| Whether upon their heads they walk | 15 |
| Or stand upon their feet— | |
| |
| “We cannot tell, we do not know, | |
| Imagination stops confounded; | |
| We can but say ‘It may be so,’ | |
| To every theory propounded.” | 20 |
| Too glad were we in this our scheme | |
| Of things, his notions to embrace,— | |
| But—I have dreamed an awful dream | |
| Of Three-dimensioned Space! | |
| |
| I dreamed—the horror seemed to stun | 25 |
| My logical perception strong— | |
| That everything beneath the sun | |
| Was so unutterably wrong. | |
| I thought—what words can I command?— | |
| That nothing ever did come right. | 30 |
| No wonder you can’t understand: | |
| I could not, till last night! | |
| |
| I would not, if I could, recall | |
| The horror of those novel heavens, | |
| Where Present, Past, and Future all | 35 |
| Appeared at sixes and at sevens, | |
| Where Capital and Labor fought, | |
| And, in the nightmare of the mind, | |
| No contradictories were thought | |
| As truthfully combined! | 40 |
| |
| Nay, in that dream-distorted clime, | |
| These fatal wilds I wandered through, | |
| The boundaries of Space and Time | |
| Had got most frightfully askew. | |
| “What is ‘askew’?” my love, you cry; | 45 |
| I cannot answer, can’t portray; | |
| The sense of Everything awry | |
| No language can convey. | |
| |
| I can’t tell what my words denote, | |
| I know not what my phrases mean; | 50 |
| Inexplicable terrors float | |
| Before this spirit once serene. | |
| Ah, what if on some lurid star | |
| There should exist a hapless race, | |
| Who live and love, who think and are, | 55 |
| In Three-dimensioned Space! | |
| |
