quantia

Promethean workings, and their fruit

Low-hanging to be plucked for our delight

And bring destruction of the virgin globe

We shed our State of Nature, to be kings

Restored to our birthright amongst the stars

The music of the spheres rains down to earth

In meteoric streaks across our night

Caught cradled in each parabolic dish

And brings a picture of our early world

Ballooning through itself from ancient time —

Do we pretend to know it by its fruits?

The shower of the heavens rattles through

The chassis of each mind and carries thence

The pattern of this grand and cold design

So heavenly conceived, without concept

amongst the scattered elements, nor rhyme.

And from that hoary wasteland of great fires

Who, breaking bonds of matter, make the sky

We see what they cannot, who from the first

Were present, and with tendrils grasping forth

In mindless octopoidal fury fierce

First pulled the ingots of our world to meet

And lit our way to see from out our caves

That to the height of such colossal deeds

We might discern the structure of their void

And comprehend this place they make their home.

We can at once discern with naked eye

Amongst the hellish blackness fellow sparks

That knew the ancients of our infant globe

Why did we cast these gods out of our gaze

Who, mindless, brought our minds into the world?

For want of cause, regardless of their truth?

Who stopped our apprehension of the world?

Our minds did hide those giants from our eyes,

Our reason so resenting causeless fact

It led us into chaos greater still

Our percepts shunned, only to be replaced

By superstitions shaped to fit our shells

And highly to exalt the mind itself

To kingly status of eternal truth

If such a wily coup could so be wrought

With cruelty on the puppets of our caves.

And so the world was razed to desert sand

But all in vain. The mind turned on itself

And hurled blind superstitions at themselves

To hideously crash and burn within

The boundless colosseum of the brain

And chained with bonds of logic to its heights

It suffered thus its hepatectomy.