Two of Ives' biographers differ sharply on the value of this astonishingly complex and dissonant song. David Wooldridge, in From the Steeples and the Mountains, a study of Charles Ives (1974) calls it "extraordinary" and includes it in a list of seven that he calls "The greatest of Ives' songs..." (p. 272).

But Jan Swafford, in Charles Ives A Life with Music (1996), regards it as a "wild formalistic experiment," with a "fumbled attempt" at parody that "derails" the composition. (Swafford also objects to the words at this point as an outburst of the homophobic terminology he used on people who couldn't understand his and other "good, strong music.")

The song's first critic was Ives' apartment-mate Bill Maloney. Ives and a group of young businessmen friends had a series of apartments in New York City that they jokingly called "Poverty Flat." (Not that the apartment, at 65 Central Park West, was at all poverty-stricken.) Ives' roommates were remarkably tolerant of the young insurance man's proclivity to play very weird music on the piano late into the night. But the early ideas that became On the Antipodes were too much for Bill Maloney, as Ives noted on the paper including the sketch, who was "mad at this," said it "just hammers" and complained that he couldn't sleep. This note is dated St. Pat's Day (i.e., March 17th), 1904.

One's sympathies have to be with Maloney—he was a busy young lawyer who had to get his rest to be at his best in court the next day. Ives' music was made of dense, triple-forte chords in twelve-tone formations. Although (as Wooldridge points out) he was an outstanding pianist with a reach wider even than Rachmaninov's, he had to pound these as broken chords and repeat them over and over until he was sure of their effect.

The text of the song, by Ives, is a set of contradictory mirrored antipodal statements expressing about Nature: "Nature's relentless; Nature is kind. Nature is Eternity; Nature's today! Nature is geometry; Nature is mystery. Nature's man's master; Nature's man's slave," et cetera.

The song is scored for two pianos and singer, and Ives suggests that strings can be added to the piano part to sustain its notes. The mirror-image structure of the song is reflected in the structure of the music, for the parts often move in mirrored contrary motion. Ives applies series (twelve-tone) principles in the music, and piles harsh tone clusters—as many as 42 different notes at once—on top of each other. The highly dissonant intervals of minor seconds, major sevenths, and tritones abound. The only relief is the parodistic, soft tonal music on the words, "Sometimes Nature's nice and sweet, as a little pansy; and sometimes it ain't!" This is the passage Swafford particularly objects to, for good musical and literary reason: Compared with the rest of the text, the line is, in this writer's view almost fatally bathetic.

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