(TDB) - Wine and poetry have long enjoyed a happy relationship, the one often fuelling the other. But while wine has served as a poet’s muse since time immemorial, a number of scribes have gone a step further and penned odes to wine, from English romantic poet Percy B. Shelley rhapsodising about the vine’s “kindling clusters” to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda describing wine as the “starry child of the earth with your feet of purple or topaz blood.” Persian philosopher, astronomer and poet Omar Khayyam was so taken with the charms of the fermented grape that he dedicates a large number of his verses to the subject, where he extols the virtues of wine as a life force and something that should be enjoyed in order to make the most of our time “before we too into the dust descend.” Read on for our round up of the top ten wine poems. If we’ve missed off any gems, let us know in the comment box below.

10: A Drinking Song, William Butler Yeats

Dublin-born poet William Butler Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for his poetry, and was the first Irishman to be honoured with the award. Fascinated by the occult, mysticism and astrology, Yeats was inspired and informed by the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Percy B. Shelley. In 1880, he and Ernest Rhys co-founded the Rhymers’ Club, a group of London-based poets who regularly met in a Fleet Street tavern to recite their verse, referring to the group as the “Tragic Generation” in his autobiography.

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That’s all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at you, and I sigh.