nadir: thanks for your response.
In fact, I did just as you suggested a while ago as I was tweaking with Options>General. The result was that WP went completely out of whack returning error pages when I clicked tabs on the Dashboard plus when I clicked View Site, it returned a page listing all the elements of the first page of the blog but without a theme.
At that point, I went back to CPanel, erased the WP installation, and re-installed it in a directory I called “WordPress.” Then, I uploaded the themes I was talking about again.
I’m glad to report “improvement.” I now have Broken Themes instead of no themes at all. WP says “Stylesheet is missing.”
Under Options>General WordPress address (URI) and Blog Address (URI) are both https://epithesisnow.com/wordpress/
The names of the uploaded themes are cub-reporter and mw1.1.
It looks like that code is indeed poetry, but of the slightly goofy kind…