ODE TO BACCHUS.
Sportive Bacchus, hail to thee,
Wine’s supreme divinity!
Bards mistaken oft have sung
Thee, for ever blithe and young,
Jovial, ruddy, gay and free,
Always fraught with mirth and glee,
Blest with power to impart
Balm that heals the wounded heart!
Shall brain-wove fiction then alone inspire
The enraptur’d poet’s adulating lays?
If heav’n-born Truth attune her golden lyre,
Where are his boasted honours, where his bays?
Like conscious guilt, which seeks the shades of night,
They fly from truth’s investigating light.
Now let the god himself appear,
Midst all the sport of mingled dance:
What sounds discordant strike mine ear,
As Bacchus and his crew advance.
Behold! the god approaching nigh,
His face with deadly paleness fraught,
No pleasure sparkling in his eye;
A thinking being void of thought.
And next his car, so! madd’ning rage,
(Prepar’d on rape or murder to engage)
High brandishes his angry arm,
And spreads around the dire alarm.
While white-rob’d Virtue, child of Heav’n!
Whose pow’rs untainted joys obtain,
By noise and dissipation driv’n,
Fearfully flies the giddy train.
Reason, fair Virtue’s bright compeer!
Beholds and joins her rapid flight,
Intent to seek some happier sphere,
Where mirth and innocence unite.
Still as they go, with pitying eye
They view the Bacchanalian crew,
For these they heave the parting sigh,
And kindly look their last adieu.
Next dire diseases crowd his train,
With inexhausted hoards of woe;
Fevers replete with burning pain,
Lingering consumptions, sure tho’ slow,
And last, to close the horrid scene,
With haggard eye, and frightful mien,
Lo! the grim tyrant Death appears;
A ghastly smile his visage wears,
Whilst in his hand exultingly he shews;
Emblem of timeless fate! the wither’d half-blown rose.
If such th’ attendants which belong
To Bacchus, “roseate god of wine,”
O make me, rose-lipp’d Temp’rance, thine,
And shield me from so dire a throng—
Till youth, with all its joys are flown,
And age has mark’d me for his own.
NEW-YORK: Printed by JOHN BULL, No. 115, Cherry-Street, where every Kind of Printing work is executed with the utmost Accuracy and Dispatch.—Subscriptions for this Magazine (at 2s. per month) are taken in at the Printing-Office, and by E. MITCHELL, Bookseller, No. 9, Maiden-Lane.