Which is the properist day to drink?
Saturday, Sunday, Monday?
Each is the properist day I think,
Why should I name but one day?
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
That is a musical round or catch popular with glee club singers in 18th century and Regency England. It was surely sung while clinking glasses.
On the other hand, an alternative musical piece of the time responds:
Take a glass, but not of sherry
For we without it can be merry.
Cold water makes us happy, very.
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It is not for this column to take a stand on drinking although your columnist sometimes visits his wine cellar for inspiration. It is to suggest how many great poets have saluted the bottle and found it a suitable subject for verse. Here are several examples.
EDGAR ALLEN POE
Filled with mingled cream and amber,
I will drain that glass again.
Such hilarious visions clamber
Through the chamber of my brain.
Quaintest thoughts, queerest fancies
Come to life and fade away.
What care I how time advances;
I am drinking ale today.
HENRY ALDRICH
If all be true that I do think,
There are five reasons we should drink:
Good wine – a friend – or being dry –
Or lest we should be by and by –
Or any other reason why.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
AMY LOWELL
Happiness to me is wine,
Effervescent, superfine.
Full of tang and fiery pleasure,
Far too hot to leave me leisure
For a single thought beyond it.
Drunk! Forgetful! This the bond: it
Means to give one’s soul to gain
Life’s quintessence. Even pain
Pricks to livelier living, then
Wakes the nerves to laugh again,
Rapture’s self is three parts sorrow.
Although we must die to-morrow,
Losing every thought but this;
Torn, triumphant, drowned in bliss.
And there are plenteous versions of this quatrain attributed to Dorothy Parker.
I like to have a Martini,
But two at the very most.
Three and I’m under the table.
Four and I’m under the host.
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I will admit that I have a nominal interest in one beverage. Nominal meaning we share the same name. In northern England, there’s a popular alcoholic drink called perry, not to be confused with sherry. Perry is made from the fermented juice of pears and is sometimes described as “the English champagne.” I asked my friend Anonymous if he had encountered it in America, and he responded that it was the key ingredient of his favorite pudding or “pudd” as he puts it.
I must assert there’s one dessert
Whose flavor I extol:
A perry pudd at Tanglewood
Served up in a Stockbridge bowl.
Anonymous. How he goes on. Anon.
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In the drinking world there is always the question of where to imbibe if not at home. John Keats cast his vote for the Mermaid Tavern, which was famous in Elizabethan times but burned down in the Great Fire of London (1666). It lives on in his poem:
Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
Have ye tippled drink more fine
Than mine host’s Canary wine?
Or are fruits of Paradise
Sweeter than those dainty pies
Of venison? O generous food!
Drest as though bold Robin Hood
Would, with his maid Marian,
Sup and bowse from horn and can.
I have heard that on a day
Mine host’s sign-board flew away,
Nobody knew whither, till
An astrologer’s old quill
To a sheepskin gave the story,
Said he saw you in your glory,
Underneath a new old sign
Sipping beverage divine,
And pledging with contented smack
The Mermaid in the Zodiac.
Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
For Cole Porter, when he lived in Paris, there was a favorite watering-place in the Ritz Hotel.
When the day’s business battle is won,
And your spirits have sunk with the sun,
And again you’re aware
That it’s time to prepare
For that dinner that’s got to be done,
There’s a place in the center of town
That can give the required benefits.
So if lacking in pep.
I advise you to step
To that little old bar in the Ritz.
There, Americans, Germans and Greeks
Mix with Arab and Argentine sheiks.
There’s a man on one bench
Who’s undoubtedly French,
For the waiters all blush when he speaks.
There, where fizzes and punches and grogs
Mix with cocktails and Pommery splits,
International thirst
Can be seen at its worst
At that little old bar in the Ritz.
* * *
The best-known poem about drinking doesn’t require a beverage at all. It’s by Ben Jonson and is titled “To Celia.”
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent’st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee!
* * *
Some people say that a drink or two can contribute to a false sense of bravery. I don’t know if that’s true, but an Irish friend of mine did pass along this story:
Some Guinness was spilt on the barroom floor
When the pub was shut for the night.
When out of his hole crept a wee brown mouse
And stood in the pale moonlight.
He lapped up the frothy foam from the floor
Then back on his haunches he sat.
And all night long, you could hear the mouse roar,
“Bring on the goddamn cat!”
* * *
One might ask what happened to poetry-about-drinking during America’s Prohibition. Was there a falling-off? The answer is Not Really, but perhaps you might have found an occasional change of tone.
Mother’s in the kitchen
Washing out the jugs;
Sister’s in the pantry
Bottling all the suds;
Father’s in the cellar
Mixing up the hops;
Johnny’s on the front porch
Watching for the cops.
* * *
The British humorist G.K. Chesterton reached back to Biblical days and Noah’s Ark to explain that wine and water shouldn’t mix.
Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,
He ate his egg with a ladle in a egg-cup big as a pail,
And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and fish he took was Whale,
But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail,
And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
“I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”
The cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the brink
As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink,
The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink,
And Noah he cocked his eye and said, “It looks like rain, I think,
The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,
But I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”
To which I add, “Amen.”
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One of the prime values of drinking-poetry is providing toasts for all occasions, sober and not so. Here is Robert Burns in serious mode toasting Admiral Rodney for his victory over the French navy in the Caribbean.
Instead of a song, boys, I’ll give you a toast,
Here’s the memory of those on the twelfth that we lost;
That we lost, did I say, nay, by heav’n that we found,
For their fame it shall last while the world goes round.
The next in succession, I’ll give you the King,
Whoe’er wou’d betray him, on high may he swing;
And here ‘s the grand fabric, our free Constitution,
As built on the base of the great Revolution;
And longer with Politics, not to be cramm’d,
Be Anarchy cur’sd, and be Tyranny damn’d;
And who wou’d to Liberty e’er prove disloyal,
May his son be a hangman, and he his first trial.
* * *
And in a decidedly less patriotic display, here is a toast by Britain’s finest living poet, Roger McGough. The backstory concerns a product invented by Lydia Pinkham that proposed to cure just about everything.
We’ll drink a drink, a drink
To Lily the Pink, the Pink, the Pink
The saviour of the human race
For she invented medicinal compound
Most efficacious in every case
Mr. Freers had sticky out ears
And it made him awful shy
And so they gave him medicinal compound
And now he’s learning how to fly
Old Ebenezer thought he was Julius Caesar
And so they put him in a home
Where they gave him medicinal compound
And now he’s emperor of Rome
Jennifer Eccles had terrible freckles
And the boys all called her names
But they gave her medicinal compound
Now he joins in all the games
We’ll drink a drink, a drink
To Lily the Pink, the Pink, the Pink
The savior of our human race
For she invented, medicinal compound
Most efficacious in every case
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And now to our Video.
VIDEO. Vincent Price and his friends from the First Poetry Quartet deliver a pair of drinking-poems. Then we hear a sprightly performance of “Which is the Properist Day to Drink.” Can that be a hiccup at the end?
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: PROPERIST DAY TO DRINK
