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keeping time with their bounding feet,
blending its beat with the loud and sweet
breath of the Phrygian flutes, and they
gave it to Rhea to keep one day.
Now to its pounding the cries of her revelers ring.
Once she was robbed of this coveted thing,
she the Great Mother, Rhea the goddess: unruly
Satyrs got hold of it, passing it duly
on to us, for the winter rites,
dances wherein Dionysus in turn delights.

Sweet in the mountains to fall outrun by the throng in
the full cry,
fall entranced, wearing the holy garment of fawnskin,
fall hunting the fresh blood of the slain goat and the
ecstasy
of the raw feast we go racing to win
into the mountains of Phrygia, Lydia, happily led
by the Thunderer, first in the hunting-calls.
And the ground is flowing with white milk and flowing
with red
wine and flowing with nectar of bees,
while a smoke as of Syrian incense falls
streaming away from the shaft shaken aloft to the
breeze
by the priest possessed, lifting the glaring flash of a
torch of pine
as he runs, driving the wanderers back to the dancing‐
line,
shouting, brandishing, hurling his hair
long and delicate high in the air.

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