Bacchus By Ralph Waldo Emerson

BRING me wine but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape
Or grew on vine whose tap-roots reaching through
Under the Andes to the Cape
Suffer’d no savour of the earth to ‘scape.

Let its grapes the morn salute
From a nocturnal root
Which feels the acrid juice
Of Styx and Erebus;
And turns the woe of Night
By its own craft to a more rich delight.

We buy ashes for bread;
We buy diluted wine;
Give me of the true
Whose ample leaves and tendrils curl’d
Among the silver hills of heaven
Draw everlasting dew;
Wine of wine
Blood of the world
Form of forms and mould of statures
That I intoxicated
And by the draught assimilated
May float at pleasure through all natures;
The bird-language rightly spell
And that which roses say so well:

Wine that is shed
Like the torrents of the sun
Up the horizon walls
Or like the Atlantic streams which run
When the South Sea calls.

Water and bread
Food which needs no transmuting
Rainbow-flowering wisdom-fruiting
Wine which is already man
Food which teach and reason can.

Wine which Music is —
Music and wine are one —
That I drinking this
Shall hear far Chaos talk with me;
Kings unborn shall walk with me;
And the poor grass shall plot and plan
What it will do when it is man.

Quicken’d so will I unlock
Every crypt of every rock.

I thank the joyful juice
For all I know;
Winds of remembering
Of the ancient being blow
And seeming-solid walls of use
Open and flow.

Pour Bacchus! the remembering wine;
Retrieve the loss of me and mine!
Vine for vine be antidote
And the grape requite the lote!
Haste to cure the old despair;
Reason in Nature’s lotus drench’d–
The memory of ages quench’d–
Give them again to shine;
Let wine repair what this undid;
And where the infection slid
A dazzling memory revive;
Refresh the faded tints
Recut the ag¨¨d prints
And write my old adventures with the pen
Which on the first day drew
Upon the tablets blue
The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.