To Sir Isaac

[Verse 1]
T'was sixteen hundred forty-two in Lincolnshire, you see
When on this earth was born a boy perplexed by gravity
Both light and motion held his thoughts as did the stars and earth
Young Isaac contemplated things from the moment of his birth

[Verse 2]
T'was granny brought the young lad up, at 19 years he swore
At Cambridge to bask in the light of others gone before
Descartes and Boyle and Galileo, Aristotle too
Absorbing genius of the past, re-casting it anew

[Verse 3]
T'was there at University such eagerness he'd shown
'Till plague closed down those sacred halls and left him on his own
Through eighteen months sequestered off from others' thoughts he stewed
And made those monster, bombshell thoughts and theories which ensued

[Verse 4]
With pendulum and telescope and prism oft played he
Trying o'er and o'er to find the truth in what may be
The force that holds us to the ground and makes the apple drop
A thing that hardly matters unless this law should stop

[Verse 5]
Now let me not distort the truth of Newton all the while
His optics had a finite need with Hooke to reconcile
At times he unified the work of great minds gone before
And at other times, distracted, lost, he knocked at the wrong door

[Verse 6]
Perhaps that's why when fifty years of age his nerves did fail
His fame allowed him wealth and ease but his mind was turning frail
Though knighted by the good Queen Anne in 1708
For nearly twenty years beyond, his mind would vegetate

[Chorus]
So let's all raise a glass to youth, its curious probing mind
Its urge to make some logic of the stranger truths we find
As born when Rembrandt held a brush and dead when Bach composed
Sir Isaac's universal mind changed his'try, then reposed