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; thy 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.