From Plane To Sphere

They all tried. They tried to free Euclid of every flaw. At Bach’s time Girolamo Saccheri did And Adrien-Marie Legendre later. Unconsoled, Pitying himself and all mankind, Farkas Bolyai came back With broken mast and torn sail. He came back from the voyage To the reefs of the infernal Dead Sea. He traversed the bottomless night, Devoting his life to the search for truth, Trying to prove Euclid’s fifth postulate And reach the parallels. At the beginning he warned his son But later he encouraged, even urged him To come forth with the novel idea Of non-Euclidean geometry, For violets react to light in early spring. And János indeed Brought forward new theorems. In eighteen twenty three, When he was only twenty-one years old, He solved the timeworn problem. He created a new universe By removing points, lines and parallels From the surface of the plane And placing them In the realm of the sphere.