LEADER . Then listen Thebes, nurse of Semele,
Crown your hair with ivy
Turn your fingers green with bryony
Redden your walls with berries,
Decked with boughs of oak and fir
Come dance the dance of god.
Fringe your skins of dappled fawn
With wool from the shuttle and loom
For the looms are abandoned by throngs of women
They run to the mountains and Bromius before
They follow the violent wand of the bringer of life
The violent wand,
Of the gentle, jealous, joy!
BACCHANTES [ like a wail ]. Bromius, Bromius . . .
LEADER [ progressively radiant ]. He . . . is . . .
Sweet upon the mountains, such sweetness
As afterbirth, such sweetness as death.
His hand strap wildness, and breed it gentle
He infuses tameness with savagery.
I have seen him on the mountains, in vibrant fawn-skin
I have seen him smile in the red flash of blood
I have seen the raw heart of a mountain-lion
Yet pulsing in his throat.
In the mountains of Eritrea, in the deserts of Libya
In Phrygia whose copper hills ring with cries of
Bromius, Zagreus, Dionysos,
I know he is the awaited, the covenant, promise,
Restorer of fullness to Nature's lean hours.
As milk he flows in the earth, as wine
In the hills. He runs in the nectar of bees, and
In the duct of their sting lurks — Bromius.
Oh let his flames burn gently in you, gently,
Or else — consume you it must — consume you . . .
CHORUS . Bromius . . . Bromius . . .
LEADER . His hair a bush of foxfires in the wind
A streak of lightning his thyrsus.
He runs, he dances,
Kindling the tepid
Spurring the stragglers
And the women are like banks to his river —
A stream of gold from beyond the desert —
They cradle the path of his will.
CHORUS . Come, come Dionysos . . .