The Brewing of Soma

The fagots blazed, the caldron’s smoke

Up through the green wood curled;

“Bring honey from the hollow oak,

Bring milky sap,” the brewers spoke,

In the childhood of the world.

And brewed they well or brewed they ill,

The priests thrust in their rods,

First tasted, and then drank their fill,

And shouted, with one voice and will,

“Behold the drink of gods!”

They drank, and lo! in heart and brain

A new, glad life began;

The gray of hair grew young again,

The sick man laughed away his pain,

The cripple leaped and ran.

“Drink, mortals, what the gods have sent,

Forget your long annoy.”

So sang the priests. From tent to tent

The Soma’s sacred madness went,

A storm of drunken joy.

Then knew each rapt inebriate

A winged and glorious birth,

Soared upward, with strange joy elate,

Beat, with dazed head, Varuna’s gate,

And, sobered, sank to earth.

The land with Soma’s praises rang;

On Gihon’s banks of shade

Its hymns the dusky maidens sang;

In joy of life or mortal pang

All men to Soma prayed.

The morning twilight of the race

Sends down these matin psalms;

And still with wondering eyes we trace

The simple prayers to Soma’s grace,

That Vedic verse embalms.

As in that child-world’s early year,

Each after age has striven

By music, incense, vigils drear,

And trance, to bring the skies more near,

Or lift men up to heaven!

Some fever of the blood and brain,

Some self-exalting spell,

The scourger’s keen delight of pain,

The Dervish dance, the Orphic strain,

The wild-haired Bacchant’s yell,—

The desert’s hair-grown hermit sunk

The saner brute below;

The naked Santon, hashish-drunk,

The cloister madness of the monk,

The fakir’s torture-show!

And yet the past comes round again,

And new doth old fulfil;

In sensual transports wild as vain