Hymn to Dionysus

Timbrels and violins sport round the Wine-presses: the little seed;
The sportive root; the earth-worm; the gold beetle; the wise emmet
Dance ’round the Wine-presses of Liber: the centipede is there;
The ground spider with many eyes; the mole clothed in velvet;
The ambitious spider in his sullen web; the lucky golden spinner;
The earwig, armed; the tender maggot, emblem of immortality;
The flea; louse; bug; the tape-worm; all the armies of disease,
Visible or invisible to the slothful vegetating man;
The slow slug; the grasshopper that sings and laughs and drinks—
Winter comes, he folds his slender bones without a murmur;
The cruel scorpion is there; the gnat; wasp; hornet and the honey bee;
The toad and venomous newt; the serpent, clothed in gems and gold;
They throw off their gorgeous raiment; they rejoice with loud jubilee
Around the Wine-presses of Liber, naked and drunk with wine.

There is the nettle that stings with soft down; and there
The indignant thistle, whose bitterness is bred in his milk,
Who feeds on contempt of his neighbor; there all the idle weeds
That creep around the obscure places, show their various limbs,
Naked in all their beauty dancing ’round the Wine-presses.

But in the Wine-presses the human grapes sing not, nor dance;
They howl and writhe in shoals of torment; in fierce flames consuming;
In chains of iron and in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires;
In pits and dens and shades of death; in shapes of torment and woe;
The plates and screws and wracks and saws and cords and fires and cisterns;
The cruel joys of Liber’s daughters, lacerating with knives
And whips their victims, and the deadly sport of Liber’s sons.