Immortal Drunkenness by Thomas Wolfe

Immortal drunkenness!
What tribute can we ever pay,
What song can we ever sing,
What swelling praise can ever be sufficient
To express the joy, the gratefulness, and the love
Which we, who have known youth and hunger in
America,
Have owed to alcohol?

We are so lost, so lonely, so forsaken, in America:
Immense and savage skies bend over us,
And we have no door.

But you, immortal drunkenness,
Came to us in our youth
When all our hearts were sick with hopelessness,
Our spirits maddened with unknown terrors,
And our heads bowed down with nameless shame.
You came to us victoriously,
To possess us, and to fill our lives with your wild music,
To make the goat-cry burst from our exultant throats,
To make us know that here upon the wilderness, the
savage land,
That here beneath the immense, inhuman skies of time,
In all the desolation of the cities,
The gray unceasing flood-tides of the manswarm,
Our youth would soar to fortune, fame and love,
Our spirits quicken with the power of mighty poetry,
Our work go on triumphantly to fulfillment
Until our lives prevailed.

What does it matter, then,
If since that time of your first coming,
Magic drunkenness,
Our head has grown bald, our young limbs heavy,
And if our flesh has lain
Battered, bleeding in the stews?

You came to us with music, poetry, and wild joy,
When we were twenty,
When we reeled home at night
Through the old moon-whitened streets of Boston
And heard our friend, comrade, and our dead companion,
Shout through the silence of the moonwhite square:
"You are a poet and the world is yours."
And victory, joy,
Wild hope, and swelling certitude
And tenderness
Surged through the conduits of our blood
As we heard that drunken cry,
And triumph, glory, proud belief
Was resting like a chrysm around us
As we heard that cry,
And turned our eyes then
To the moon-drunk skies of Boston,
Knowing only that we were young,
And drunk,
And twenty,
And that the power of mighty poetry
Was within us,
And the glory of the great earth
Lay before us-
Because we were young and drunk and twenty,
And could never die!


Magic
And who shall say-
Whatever disenchantment follows-
That we ever forget magic,
Or than we can ever betray,
On this leaden earth,
The apple-tree, the singing,
And the gold?


New Orleans -- River

And he looked upon
The huge yellow snake of the river,
Dreaming of its distant shores,
The myriad estuaries
Lush with tropical growth that fed it,
All the romantic life
Of plantation and canefields that fringed it,
Of moonlight,
Of dancing darkies on the levee,
Of slow lights on the gilded river-boat,
And the perfumed flesh of black-haired women,
Musical wraiths
Below the phantom drooping trees.