Classic Poem

A MID Cithaeron's wilderness, what time
Ambiguous eve was brightening stars with shade,
I heard young Bacchus boasting, as, superb
In languid pride and jovial indolence,
He leaned against a plane-tree richly wed
With vine at the Immortal's touch upgrown.
Low-browed, with pulsing nostril and short lip,
And slackly muscular he leaned, a cup
Idly on his plump finger balancing,
And glorying thus he mocked the other Gods:

Apollo, Hermes, Hera, Cybele,
Poseidon, Aphrodite, Artemis,
And very majesty of Zeus, look down,
And say where ye descry your worshippers.
Cold flaky ashes choke the relic brand,
Unbutchered lows the steer, neglected droops
The chaplet interwoven with pale webs.
For that the cities and the villages
Are void of those who worshipped erst, but now,
Evöe-shrieking, thyrsus-brandishing,
Grape-maddened, roam Cithaeron's wilds with me,
The youngest and the mightiest of the Gods.

Thus vaunting, he strode forth, and with proud glance
Surveyed his retinue, but instantly
Contentment fled him, and he flushed with wrath,
'Ware of the presence of a mightier God;
For all the Maenads lay subdued by Sleep.
Careless in flowing attitudes, like streams
Of living beauty poured and serpenting,
They lay on bunches of crushed grapes, or coils
Of limber ivy, delicate of leaf,
Blent with the thyrsus, the empurpled bowl,
And copious tresses' prodigality.
The deadly beauty of the leopardess
Slumbered among them, tawnier for the milk
Of their smooth limbs, blunt head and dainty paw
Entangled in the wreaths, and, carried long
In frenzy, the loosed serpent stole away.
And Bacchus raised his hand as if to grasp
His ivy crown, and hurl it 'mid the troop:
When lo! his hand met poppies, and his lips
Inbreathed a fume more odorous than the sweet
Of saturated wine-jars long immured
And fresh unsealed. Swimming, his eye-ball thrice
Circuited the moist oval of his eye,
Then sank, and his drowsed hand dismissed the cup;
And as a poured libation bubbles, creams,
Then melts into the sod, so were his limbs
Convulsed, composed, and as the wavering fall
Of a shed rose-leaf on a windless noon,
Such was his mild declension to the earth.
There, undulant yet moveless, low he lay,
The youngest and the loveliest of the Gods.
And then a cloud eclipsed Cithaeron's snow,
And issuing thunder boomed, big with the bland
And sovran laughter of supremest Zeus.