..."vintage from Atlantis" -- this reminded me of this poem I love by C. S. Lewis. Ignore the line numbering unless you go to the source.
THE END OF THE WINE by C. S. Lewis
(Printed in Punch, 3 December 1947 and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1964)
1. You think if we sigh as we drink the last decanter
2. We’re sensual topers, and thence you are ready to prose
3. And read your lecture. But need you? Why should you banter
4. Or badger us? Better imagine it thus: We’ll suppose
5. A man to have come from Atlantis eastward sailing–
6. Lemuria has fallen in the fury of a tidal wave;
7. The cities are fallen; the pitiless, all prevaling,
8. Inhuman ocean is Numinor’s salt grave.
9. To Europe he comes from Lemuria, saved from the wreck
10. Of the gilded, loftily builded, countless fleet
11. With the violet sails. A phial hangs from his neck,
12. Holding the last of a golden cordial, subtle and sweet.
13. Untamed is Europe, untamed–a wet desolation,
14. Unwelcoming woods of the elk, of the mammoth and bear,
15. The fen and the forest. The men of a barbarous nation,
16. On the sand in a circle are standing, await him there.
17. Horribly ridged are their foreheads. Weapons of stone,
18. Unhandy and blunt, they brandish in their clumsy grips.
19. Their females set up a screaming, their pipes drone,
20. They gaze and mutter. He raises his flask to his lips.
21. And it brings to his mind the strings, the flutes, the tabors,
22. How he drank with the poets at the banquet, robed and crowned;
23. He recalls the pillared halls carved with the labours
24. Of curious masters (Lemuria’s cities lie drowned),
25. The festal nights, when each jest that flashed for a second,
26. Light as a bubble, was bright with a thousand years
27. Of nurture–the honour and the grace unreckoned
28. That sat like a robe on the Atlantean peers.
29. It has made him remember ladies and the proud glances,
30. Their luminous glances in Numinor and the braided hair,
31. The ruses and mockings, the music and the grave dances
32. (Where musicians played, the huge fishes goggle and stare).
33. So he sighs, like us; then rises and turns to meet
34. Those naked men. Will they make him their spoil and prey?
35. Or salute him as god and brutally fawn at his feet?
36. And which would be worse? He pitches the phial away.
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