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