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[miscellanny.livejournal.com]

A Vindication
by Li Po

If heaven loved not the wine,
A Wine Star would not be in heaven;
If earth loved not the wine,
The Wine Spring would not be on the earth.
Since heaven and earth love the wine,
Need a tippling mortal be ashamed?
The transparent wine, I hear,
Has the soothing virtue of a sage,
While the turgid is rich, they say,
As the fertile mind of the wise.
Both the sage and the wise were drinkers,
Why seek for peers among gods and goblins?
Three cups open the grand door to bliss;
Take a jugful, the universe is yours.
Such is the rapture of the wine,
That the sober shall never inherit.

Comments

[musical-muse.livejournal.com]

Brillig!

*goes off thinking about new Dionysus icons...*

[ari-o.livejournal.com]

ooooh slithy!

[joewithnoname.livejournal.com]

Actually quite lot of Chinese poetry is about wine, especially Li Po's. If I'm not confusing him with someone else, he apocryphally died trying to embrace the moon reflected in a river while boating drunk. Although that might be Li Bai

--John

[ari-o.livejournal.com]

Makes me want to read Rimbaud's "Le Bateau Ivre"

all hail drunk poems - which is of course all of Dylan Thomas!

[musical-muse.livejournal.com]

To begin at the beginning, it is Spring, starless and bible-black, the
cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courter's-and-rabbits' wood limping
invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing
sea. The houses are are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the
snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by
the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows'
weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now...

[ari-o.livejournal.com]

A man and a woman are one
A man and a woman and a blackbird are also one

[batyatoon]

If we're doing Milliways-minded poems:

being to timelessness as it's to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land

(do lovers suffer?all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad?only their smallest joy's
a universe emerging from a wish)

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

-- do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools,all's well

-e.e.cummings, naturally.