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Full Moon
1 May 2026
Sarah
Doyle
The Bacchanal
of the Andrians
A lipogram after Titian’s
The Bacchanal of the Andrians
(1523-1526)
Containers raised, fashionable
hedonists brandish alcohol.
Dribble-fanciers, alfresco scoffers;
bald-faced non-abstainers, all.
Clarion call to ancient barflies:
a declaration of disinhibition.
Non-balancers roll and loll,
babble of anarchical escalation.
Cheers! Another! And another!
Strident chants ricochet the hills.
Ribald, lathered, blotto-hearted,
bladdered, adrenalin-thrilled.
Old habits of abstinence, cast
aside, for insatiable infractions.
Breasts are bared, desires aired,
anti-ascetic sensation sanctioned.
Cathartic obliteration! Throats tilt.
Restraint-free, libations descend.
Heads tender, tonsils tarnished;
at last sated, Bacchanalia ends.
Inebriation’s hero? Non-attendant.
The chief hedonist – absent, bailed.
On the distant sea, anchor raised –
charade done, his sailboat sails.
Behind the poem...
Titian’s The Bacchanal of the Andrians depicts a group of people in various stages of undress, lolling or dancing on a hillside with drunken abandon. I thought it would be playful for my poem to be a lipogram: one containing only words that can be made from the letters in the painting’s title. Formally, a half-rhyme – or, perhaps, a drunk-rhyme – ripples between pairs of couplets. Bacchus himself is conspicuous by his absence. I wanted to highlight the distant sailboat that may be spiriting him away, leaving mayhem in his wake.