Our souls shall be Leviathans In purple seas of wine When drunkenness is dead with death, And drink is all divine; Learning in those immortal vats What mortal vineyards mean; For only in heaven we shall know How happy we have been. Like clouds that wallow in the wind Be free to drift and drink; Tower without insolence when we rise, Without surrender sink: Dreams dizzy and crazy we shall know And have no need to write Our blameless blasphemies of praise, Our nightmares of delight. For so in such misshapen shape The vision came to me, Where such titanian dolphins dark Roll in a sunset sea: Dark with dense colours, strange and strong Haloed like fish in phospher light The holy monsters move. Measure is here and law, to learn, When honour rules it so, To lift the glass and lay it down Or break the glass and go. But when the world’s New Deluge boils From the New Noah’s vine, Our souls shall be Leviathans In sanguine seas of wine. |