Then, in more exalted mood:
O thou, my Muse, guid auld Scotch drink!
Whether through wimplin' worms thou jink,
Or, richly brown, ream o'er the brink
In glorious faem,
Inspire me, till I lisp and wink
To sing thy name.
[Footnote: Scotch Drink.]
Keats enthusiastically concurs in Burns' statements. [Footnote: See the Sonnet on the Cottage Where Burns Was Born, and Lines on the Mermaid Tavern.]
Landor, also, tells us meaningly,
Songmen, grasshoppers and nightingales
Sing cheerily but when the throat is moist.
[Footnote: Homer; Laertes; Agatha.]
James Russell Lowell, in The Temptation of Hassan Khaled, presents the argument of the poet's tempters with charming sympathy:
The vine is nature's poet: from his bloom
The air goes reeling, typsy with perfume,
And when the sun is warm within his blood
It mounts and sparkles in a crimson flood,
Rich with dumb songs he speaks not, till they find
Interpretation in the poet's mind.
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.
[Footnote: Tales of the Mermaid Inn.]