Bacchus

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bring me wine, but wine which never grew In the belly of the grape, Or grew on vine whose taproots reaching through Under the Andes to the Cape, Suffered no savor of the world 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 curled 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: Quickened 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 ot 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 lot. Haste to cure the old despair, Reason in nature's lotus drenched, The memory of ages quenched;— Give them again to shine. Let wine repair what this undid, And where the infection slid, And dazzling memory revive. Refresh the faded tints, Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures, with the pen Which, on the first day, drew Upon the tablets blue The dancing Pleiads, and the eternal men.