Keats, the poet of urns and nightingales, once wrote a six-line drinking joke
Before the great odes, John Keats dashed off a tiny comic verse naming three pleasures he wanted without limit: women, wine and snuff. He crowns them his holy trinity, swears by his beard, and promises to keep indulging until resurrection day. It is Keats grinning, not sighing.
The whole poem runs to six rhymed lines. Its speaker asks for his three favourite comforts in quantities large enough that he finally begs for mercy, borrowing a stage cry of surrender: "hold, enough!" Then he turns to an imagined listener and says they may object all they like, right up until the dead rise. The final couplet delivers the punchline by calling the trio his "beloved Trinity", a mock-sacred title for a pinch of tobacco, a glass and some company.
Much of the comedy comes from scale. Grand religious language, resurrection and the Trinity, is stretched over small bodily appetites, and the mild oath about his beard makes the speaker sound like a swaggering old toper rather than a young man in London. The spelling "Untill" in the second line is kept as written, a small sign of a piece jotted down informally.
The poet arrived on 31 October 1795 in Moorgate, London, the eldest of four surviving children. His father died after a fall from a horse when John was eight, and tuberculosis killed his mother when he was 14. He was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary, Thomas Hammond, and in October 1815 enrolled as a medical student at Guy's Hospital, where within a month he was assisting surgeons as a dresser.
His published career lasted under four years before tuberculosis killed him at 25 in 1821. Readers were lukewarm while he lived, yet within decades of his death he had joined the English canon, prized for a sensuous style later adored by the Pre-Raphaelites. A scrap like this one shows the same appetite for sensation, played for laughs.
Source: Give Me Women, Wine, and Snuff
