Page:Poetical Works of John Oldham.djvu/60

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A DITHYRAMBIC.

A DRUNKARD'S SPEECH IN A MASK.^[1]

'Ονκ ἐστἱ Διθύραμζος ῧν ῦδωρ πίνη.

I

YES, you are mighty wise, I warrant, mighty wise!
With all your godly tricks and artifice,
Who think to chouse me of my dear and pleasant vice.
Hence, holy sham! in vain your fruitless toil;
Go, and some inexperienced fop beguile,
To some raw entering sinner cant and whine,
Who never knew the worth of drunkenness and wine.
I've tried, and proved, and found it all divine:
It is resolved, I will drink on, and die,
I'll not one minute lose, not I,
To hear your troublesome divinity:
Fill me a top-full glass, I'll drink it on the knee,
Confusion to the next that spoils good company!

↑ Written in August, 1677. This characteristic delineation of the mad valour of drink must be understood, like the Satire against Virtue, to have been intended as a masked attack on one of the prominent vices of the day. Etherege, Rochester, or Sedley might have sat for the portrait, and were probably the actual originals from whom it was drawn. They were as notorious for their excesses in this way, as Dryden for his temperance, and Waller for water-drinking. It would be absurd to suppose that this reeling dithyrambic was seriously meant. The bombastic fury that pervades it is the very essence of ridicule. Oldham, when he wrote it, was secluded at Croydon, and neither in the disposition nor the circumstances to indulge in ’riotous, guilty living.' His days and nights were given to labour and study, and we have an evidence in the next poem, written in the following month, that his thoughts were differently employed. The dithyrambic is a singular example of premeditated extravagance. The end is attained, not by peculiar felicity of diction, but by audacious hyperbole. It does not bring out its effects by striking phrases, such as the 'plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne' of Shakespeare, or Dryden's portrait of Shadwell rolling home from a treason-tavern, ’liquored in every chink;' but it hits the mark by its accumulation of daring images. The sublimity of the Ercles' vein is capitally sustained in the last stanza, where the imperious roarer demands a deluge, with the ocean for his mighty cup; calls for the Canary fleet, setting every man to empty a ship; and finally desires the universe to be set a tilt, and the globe turned up, that they may drain the world dry.

[1] Written in August, 1677. This characteristic delineation of the mad valour of drink must be understood, like the Satire against Virtue, to have been intended as a masked attack on one of the prominent vices of the day. Etherege, Rochester, or Sedley might have sat for the portrait, and were probably the actual originals from whom it was drawn. They were as notorious for their excesses in this way, as Dryden for his temperance, and Waller for water-drinking. It would be absurd to suppose that this reeling dithyrambic was seriously meant. The bombastic fury that pervades it is the very essence of ridicule. Oldham, when he wrote it, was secluded at Croydon, and neither in the disposition nor the circumstances to indulge in ’riotous, guilty living.' His days and nights were given to labour and study, and we have an evidence in the next poem, written in the following month, that his thoughts were differently employed. The dithyrambic is a singular example of premeditated extravagance. The end is attained, not by peculiar felicity of diction, but by audacious hyperbole. It does not bring out its effects by striking phrases, such as the 'plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne' of Shakespeare, or Dryden's portrait of Shadwell rolling home from a treason-tavern, ’liquored in every chink;' but it hits the mark by its accumulation of daring images. The sublimity of the Ercles' vein is capitally sustained in the last stanza, where the imperious roarer demands a deluge, with the ocean for his mighty cup; calls for the Canary fleet, setting every man to empty a ship; and finally desires the universe to be set a tilt, and the globe turned up, that they may drain the world dry.

[1]