In Jerzy Pilch’s mordantly funny novel of alcoholism and rehab, The Mighty Angel, the narrator recounts the fate of a fellow patient who, to his lasting detriment, is a poet:

Yesterday at the evening community meeting we said goodbye to the people who were leaving. I was jealous and wanted to be one of them. Homeless Czeslaw, who was supposed to give the last farewell speech, read a poem he had written instead of giving a speech. When he finished, Nurse Viola told him he would have to repeat the whole cure from the beginning. It’s just as well I don’t know how to write poetry.

Poetry and liquor, forever linked as two-thirds of that essential trio of wine, women, and song (changing the gender as needed, of course).

Carrie Olivia Adams’s post the other day about poetry-themed cocktails sent me back to the work of an old favorite poet of drink, Robert Herrick, whose seventeenth-century poetry of jovial hedonism offers pleasures along every branch of that tree. A Google Book search on his complete works offers a rough measure of the proportions in which he took the trio, the thirty-five results for wine easily outstripping the combined twenty-eight for women and song–which ratio seems about right for a happy life, so long as one allows for the fact that any one can rule the others at any given time.

If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then Herrick’s poems are pleasures recollected in their aftermath, or absence–or, perhaps, in morbid anticipation of their absence, for Herrick’s hedonism is nearly always underlain by an implicit sense of the fleetingness of life, and especially of youth. His best-known line, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” serves nicely as a key to his oeuvre, varied in a barstool key in “To Youth”:

Drink Wine, and live here blithefull, while ye may:
The morrowe’s life too late is, Live to-day.

“Anacreontick Verse,” on the other hand, celebrates the pleasures of wine, only to turn to lamenting its lack:

Brisk methinks I am, and fine,
When I drinke my capring wine:
Then to love I do encline,
When I drinke my wanton wine:
And I wish all maidens mine,
When I drinke my sprightly wine:
Well I sup, and well I dine,
When I drinke my frolick wine:

But I languish, lowre, and Pine,
When I want my fragrant wine.

And “Upon Vineger” bemoans the sad fate that awaits neglected wine itself:

Vineger is no other I define,
Than the dead Corps, or Carkase of the Wine.

And when the need is upon the poet, where is he to turn but his patron:

To Sir Clipseby Crew

1. Give me wine, and give me meate,
To create in me a heate,
That my pulses high may beat.

2. Cold and hunger never yet
Co’d a noble Verse beget;
But your Boules with Sack repleat.

3. Give me these (my Knight) and try
In a minutes space how I
Can runne mad, and Prophesie.

4. Then if any Peece proves new,
And rare, Ile say (my dearest Crewe)
It was full enspir’d by you.

To which, sadly, the only suitable response these days seems this notebook entry found in The Way It Wasn’t, the sort-of autobiography of New Directions founder James Laughlin, who, it’s fair to say, was as much patron as publisher:

Biznizz stinks worse than ever. I am learning to care deeply for the gin. This is probably a bad thing, but what to do . . .