Through the blue summer nights when the cicadas sing, God over France a cup o'er-brimmed with stars doth pour. A taste of summer skies to my lips the breezes bring! I fain would drink all space, so freshly silvered o'er. A goblet's frigid rim is evening's air to me, whence, with my eyes half-closed, I quaff with greedy zest, like to the cooling juice from a pomegranate pressed, starred freshness slow diffused from heaven's immensity. Couched on a velvet sward, whose grasses warm betray how they had sprawled at ease beneath the breath of day, O I would drain tonight with what divine content, the cup immense and blue where wheels the firmament! Am I Bacchus? Am I Pan? I tipple space. Elate, with the freshness of the nights I slake my fever-fit, my mouth agape to heaven where planets scintillate. O, let heaven flow in me or let me melt in it! With their inebriate souls in heaven's starred cup immersed, Byron and Lamartine, Hugo and Shelly died. Yet changeless space is there. It rolls creation-wide. Scarce drunk it bears me hence, and I was still athirst! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...COMMON DUST by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON THE VALLEY OF FERN: PART 2 by BERNARD BARTON SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE: 16 by ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING SPRING GLADNESS by JOHN BURROUGHS THE WANDERER by WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER SUMMER by JENNIE COPPOCK CAFFREY SONNET, WRITTEN AT THE COUCH OF A DYING PARENT by ELIZA COOK |