Give Me the Old

Return to
Bachelor Ballads
Content Page

Next Poem

(HOME)

GIVE ME THE OLD

OLD wine to drink! –
Ay, give me the slippery juice
That drippeth from the grape thrown loose
Within the tun;
Plucked from beneath the cliff
Of sunny-sided Teneriffe,
And ripened 'neath the blink
Of India's sun!
Peat whiskey hot,
Tempered with well-boiled water!
These make the long night shorter, –
Forgetting not
Good stout old English porter.

Old wood to burn! –
Ay, bring the hill-side beech
From where the owlets meet and screech,
And ravens croak;
The crackling pine, and cedar sweet;
Bring too a clump of fragrant peat,
Dug 'neath the fern;
The knotted oak,
A faggot too, perhap
Whose bright flame, dancing, winking,
Shall light us at our drinking;
While the oozing sap
Shall make sweet music to our thinking.

Old books to read! –
Ay, bring those nodes of wit,
The brazen-clasped, the vellum writ,
Time-honored tomes!
The same my sire scanned before,
The same my grandsire thumbed o'er,
The same his sire from college bore,
The well-earned meed
Of Oxford's domes:
Old Homer blind,
Old Horace, rake Anacreon, by
Old Tully, Plautus, Terence lie;
Mort Arthur's olden minstrelsie,
Quaint Burton, quainter Spenser, ay!
And Gervase Markham's venerie –
Nor leave behind
The Holye Book by which we live and die.

Old friends to talk! –
Ay, bring those chosen few,
The wise, the courtly, and the true,
So rarely found;
Him for my wine, him for my stud,
Him for my easel, distich, bud
In mountain walk!
Bring Walter good:
With soulful Fred; and learned Will,
And thee, my alter ego, (dearer still
For every word.).

– ROBERT HINCKLEY MESSINGER

Return to
Bachelor Ballads
Content Page

Next Poem

(HOME)