Payne, John

THE WINE OF CIRCE

1. OUR modern folk have drunken of Circe’s wine
2. And yielding up their reason to the spell,
3. Think but to eat and drink and buy and sell,
4. Flouting to scorn all thought of things divine;
5. Yet, for they fare on their hind-feet, opine
6. Still to be men: but, wallowing in the hell
7. That they hold Heaven, they mostly, truth to tell,
8. Are no more human than a herd of swine.
9. Yet some there be who shun the inglorious guild
10. And in the purer places of the earth,
11. On the bright memories of their island-birth
12. Founding, a new and nobler England build,
13. That shall relume the glories of the old,
14. When the hogs dead are on their heaps of gold.