Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes Lyrics
(Ben Jonson)
Spoken:
The reason I want to sing this next song is because it has so many... it's such a strong memory for me. I can see me when I was seventeen years old, standing in the end of the Dyess High School Gymnasium at the senior class graduation. I was a junior at that time and the next year, I graduated. But I was a junior and they called on me to sing a special, they called it for the graduation, for the commencement exercises. So I'm sorry, but I don't remember my piano player's name, who was a school teacher, she played the piano and I sang this song. This was... I guess this was when I was looking for myself. But I never forgot that, because it was one of my first public singing occasions and I have sung this song mainly to myself, ever since I was seventeen years old, because of those memories. I suppose this song is Elizabethan, the words sound like the king James' version of the Bible
Sung:
Drink to me only with thine eyes
And I will pledge with mine
Or leave a kiss within the cup
And I'll not ask for wine
A thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine
But might I of Jove's nectar sip
I would not change for thine
I sent thee late a rosy wreath
Not so much hon'ring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be
But thou there on did stonily breathe
And sensed it back to me
Since when it grows and smells, I swear
Not of itself, but thee
Drink to me only with thine eyes
And I will pledge with mine
Or leave a kiss within the cup
And I'll not ask for wine
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine
But might I of Jove's nectar sip
I would not change for thine
