This is a Libra-Box recording. All Libra-Box recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libra-Box.org. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina.
Kataba Wine by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow This song of mine is a song of the vine to be sung by the glowing embers of wayside ends when the rain begins to darken the drear november's. It is not a song of the scupernong from warm Carolinian valleys, nor the Isabelle and the Muscadale that bask in our garden alleys, nor the Red Mustang whose clusters hang over the waves of the Colorado and the fiery flood of whose purple blood has a dash of Spanish bravado. For richest and best is the wine of the west that grows by the beautiful river, whose sweet perfume fills all the room with a venison on the giver. And as hollow trees are the haunts of bees forever going and coming, so this crystal hive is all alive with a swarming and buzzing and humming.
Very good in its way is the vercine, or the celery soft and creamy, but Kataba Wine has a taste more divine, more dulcet, delicious and dreamy. The drear grows no vine by the haunted rind by Danube or Guadalquiver, nor on island or Cape that bears such a grape as grows by the beautiful river. Drug is their juice for foreign use when shipped or the reeling Atlantic to wreck our brains with the fever pains that have driven the old world frantic. To the sewers end sinks with all such drinks, and after them tumble the mixer, for a poison malign is such orgy a wine where it best but a devil's elixir.
While pure is a spring is the wine I sing, and to praise it one needs but name it. Our Kataba Wine has need of no sign, no tavern bush to proclaim it. And this song of the vine, the greeting of mine, the winds and the birds shall deliver to the queen of the west in her garlands dressed on the banks of the beautiful river. And of all this poem is in the public domain.