If wine be evil, song is evil too.
His _Bacchic Ode_ is full of the same enthusiasm. Bacchus received
his highest honors at the end of the last century from the decadents in
England. Swinburne, [Footnote: See _Burns_.] Lionel Johnson,[Footnote:
See _Vinum Daemonum_.] Ernest Dowson, [Footnote: See _A Villanelle of
the Poet's Road_.] and Arthur Symonds, [Footnote: See _A Sequence to
Wine_.] vied with one another in praising inebriety as a lyrical agent.
Even the sober Watts-Dunton [Footnote: See _A Toast to Omar Khayyam_.]
was drawn into the contest, and warmed to the theme.
Poetry about the Mermaid Inn is bound to take this tone. From Keats
[Footnote: See _Lines on the Mermaid Inn_.] to Josephine Preston
Peabody [Footnote: See _Marlowe_.] writers on the Elizabethan
dramatists have dwelt upon their conviviality. This aspect is especially
stressed by Alfred Noyes, who imagines himself carried back across the
centuries to become the Ganymede of the great poets. All of the group
keep him busy. In particular he mentions Jonson:
And Ben was there,
Humming a song upon the old black settle,
"Or leave a kiss within the cup
And I'll not ask for wine,"
But meanwhile, he drank malmsey.
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