One was a youth, dressed only in a fawn skin,
with vine leaves wreathed in his curly hair.
His face would have been almost too pretty
for a boy’s, if it had not looked so extremely wild.

You felt, as Edmund said when he saw him
a few days later, ‘There’s a chap who might
do anything, absolutely anything.’

He seemed to have a great many names –
Bromios, Bassareus, and the Ram were three of them.
There were a lot of girls with him, as wild as he.
There was even, unexpectedly, someone on a donkey.
And everybody was laughing: and everyone
was shouting out, ‘EUAN, EUAN, EU-oi-oi-oi.’

Then three or four Red Dwarfs came forward
with their tinder boxes and set light to the pile,
which first crackled, and then blazed,
and finally roared as a woodland bonfire
on midsummer night ought to do.
And everyone sat down in a wide circle around it.

Then Bacchus and Silenus and the Maenads
began a dance, far wilder than the dance
of the trees, not merely a dance for fun and beauty
(though it was that too), but a magic dance of plenty,
and where their hands touched, and where their feet fell,
the feast came into existence.”