Silenus! my goblet is brilliant and cool,
My bellying goblet of gold;
Within and without it is storied about
With the gods and the Titans of old:
How the merry light dances and flickers within,
’Ere it melts in a soberer glow.
Thorough dark-dinted veins and deep flowery lanes
Toward the dusky abysses below!
Silenus, my mother was rosy and fair
When she charm’d down her Jove from the skies;
She had light soft and rare on her amber-bright hair.
And light in the blue of her eyes:
But no gleams ever shone on my mother’s bright hair
With a lustre so strangely divine
As the splendour that glides down the mellow gold sides
Of this dear little goblet of mine;
And no hues were so rich in her beautiful eyes
As the colours that vividly roam
Through the violet deeps of the wine, as it leaps
Round its hissing Charybdis of foam.
Drink! drink! The thick draught on our famishing hearts
Like a dew shall fall luscious and clear;
As it silently slips through our moist, ruddy lips
Not a bubble shall break its career:
And if the sweet current be helpless to cure.
What matter? ’Twill carry us yet
Through a stormy delight to oblivion and night—
And ’tis something, at least, to forget.