We live by the
Quaffing—Life has its Ale.²
Drink! For you don’t know whence you came, or Why—
Drink! For you don’t know why you go, or Where—³
Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s way to man.⁴
We bear our Drinking better
Than others bear their Moderation—⁵
That which makes them drunk makes us Bold—
What quenches them gives us Fire—⁶
Bacchus must his power Resign—
For I am the only God of Wine!⁷
Get the Red Wine ready for us to
Celebrate our return to the Ailing Earth!⁸
The plan was to drink until the Pain over—
But what’s worse, the pain or the Hangover?⁹
There’s no Harm in him but the drink—but
There’s not much left of him but the Drink.¹⁰
¹ Hermann Hesse tr. Basil Creighton, Steppenwolf
² Emily Dickinson, We—Bee and I
³ Omar Khayyám tr. Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát
⁴ A.E. Houseman, Terence, This is Stupid Stuff
⁵ George Eliot, Middlemarch
⁶ William Shakespeare, Macbeth
⁷ Henry Carey, A Drinking-Song
⁸ Mahmoud Darwish tr. Munir Akash & Carolyn Forché, Mural
⁹ Kanye West, Dark Fantasy
¹⁰ Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea