1. Turn gently the cup, and make gentleness your way,
And bid with it a glass of wine gilded by rays.

2. Do not go too far urging cups, for we
Drank but to live, and lived not but to drink.

3. For a little wine gives the soul relief,
But excess over justice wearies it.

4. Do not be as one who gave drink control,
So it destroyed him and ign'rance rode its steed.

5. Many think abundance of drink
Increases its benefit or makes it closer.

6. Like their thought on excess food, that it
Fattens the body when taken immoderately.

7. They misled people in their ignorance, and became
Remote from ignorance until it was compounded.

8. Strangest is that wine in every faith
Is forbidden, though made dear to it.

9. The Muslims take much of it for its intoxication
And leave a little benefit forbidden.

10. If they see a wise doctor one day
Curing anguish with it, they call him stingy and pretentious.

11. Drunkenness is but a tyrannous ruler;
When empowered, it is most empowered.

12. If you wish to drink it one day, then take for it
A wise and judicious friend or refined boon companion.

13. A friend invited me to drink at dawn, and I answered him,
“Welcome, greetings, and hospitality!”

14. And I secured him a shoulder of safety after
I laid for him a breast of time more spacious.

15. I brought it out yellow, and its cup reckons
A film of crystal bearing ambergris.

16. I gave him yellow wine, and its face shone
With a light showing us the darkness of night silvered.

17. A radiant face whose mouth smiles
When the mouth’s name adorns the mouth’s beauty.

18. We continued fulfilling the life of play,
And wandered in a meadow of companionship with grass.

19. And I love from my boon companions a noble one
Who, when touched by wine, increases in manners.

20. If a wine seasoned in its taste
He sees it, through my proximity, as sweeter.

21. He then makes it obligatory on himself to drink it with the likes of me.
If he is not alike, I see abstention as more obligatory.