The Red Sea

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 titanic dolphins dark
Roll in a sunset sea:
Dark with dense colours, strange and strong
As terrible true love,
Haloed like fish in phosphor 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.

~G.K. Chesterton

Poem: The New Omar

A book of verses underneath the bough,
  Provided that the verses do not scan,
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and Thou,
  Short-haired, all angles, looking like a man.

But let the wine be unfermented, pale,
  Of chemicals compounded, God knows how—
This were indeed the Prophet's Paradise,
  O Paradise were Wilderness enow.

~G.K. Chesterton

"Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle"

"Jesus Christ...made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. "Drink," he says, "for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace." So he stands offering us the cup in his hand. And at the high altar of Christianity stands another figure, in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. "Drink" he says "for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the crimson of the love and wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my blood of the new testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I know of whence you come and why. Drink, for I know of when you go and where.""

~G.K. Chesterton: Heretics.

The Last Supper, by Philippe de Champaigne.
Oil on canvas, c. 1652; Musée du Louvre, Paris.