Wine and Kissing

  by Byron

 

Away with your fictions of flimsy romance,

    Those tissues of falsehood which folly has wove!

Give me the mild beam of the soul-breathing glance,

    Or the rapture that swells on the first kiss of love!

 

Ye rhymers, whose bosoms with phantasy glow,

    Whose pastoral passions are made for the grove,

From what blest inspiration your sonnets would flow,

    Could you ever have tasted the first kiss of love!

 

If Apollo should e’er his assistance refuse,

    Or the Nine be disposed from your service to rove,

Invoke them no more; bid adieu to the muse,

    And try the effect of the first kiss of love.

 

I hate you, ye cold compositions of art;

    Though prudes may condemn me. and bigots reprove,

I court the effusions that spring from the heart

    Which throbs with delight at the first kiss of love.

 

Your shepherds, your flocks, those fantastical themes,

    Perhaps may amuse, yet they never can move:

Arcadia displays but a region of dreams:

    What are visions like these to the first kiss of love?

 

Oh! cease to affirm that man, since his birth,

    From Adam til now, has with wretchedness strove:

Some portion of Paradise still is on earth,

    And Eden revives in the first kiss of love.

 

When age chills the blood, when our pleasures are past, –

    For years fleet away with the wings of the dove, –

The dearest remembrance will still be the last,

    Our sweetest memorial the first kiss of love.

  By Horace

 

When thou the rosy neck of Telephus,

The waxen arms of Telephus, art praising

Woe is me, Lydia, how my jealous heart

Swells with the anguish I would vainly smother!

 

Then in my mind though has no settled base,

To and fro shifts upon my cheek the color,

And tears that glide adown in stealth reveal

By what slow fires mine inmost self consumeth.

 

I burn, whether he quarrel o’er his wine,

Stain with a bruise dishonoring thy white shoulders,

Or whether my boy-rival on thy lips

Leave by a scar the mark of his rude kisses.

 

Hope not, if thou wouldst hearken unto me,

That one so little kind prove always constant;

Barbarous indeed, to wound sweet lips imbued

By Venus with a fifth part of her nectar.*

 

Thrice happy, ay, more than thrice happy, they

Whom one soft bond unbroken binds together;

Whose love serene from bickering and reproach

In life’s last moment find the first that severs.

 

*The ancients supposed that honey contained a tenth part of nectar, and therefore the lips of Lydia were imbued with double the nectar bestowed on honey.