ABSTRACT
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries poets associated with the romantic movement in both England and Germany produced wine poems, making use particularly of the drinking song and dithyrambic ode form as a vehicle for their explorations of wine imagery and intoxication. The drinking song, like the dithyrambic ode, functions on the tripartite metaphorical relationship between wine, love, and death. Unlike the ode, however, the humorous tone of the drinking song, with its short, regular rhyming lines, indicates an acceptance of the dissolution that accompanies the pleasure of wine. Literary scholars have not given much attention to the representation of wine in Romantic drinking songs, preferring instead the odes. The dithyrambic itself is redefined in England in Greek choral ode period, and both its formal structures and wine imagery are turned inward so that drink becomes psychological rather than social phenomena.
