Nightingales in cypress branches and the moon above the lake,
Raven stone, marble stone, drunk till earth began to quake.
Loud song of bottle throat taught me in a sudden gust,
"All the world's a glance of friend's face, all the rest's a shadow cast."
Long before the day before the vintner took over my heart,
I am drunken all day long, such is the science, nothing smart,
And I ramble and celebrate my glory great, my kingdom vast,
"All the world's a glance of friend's face, all the rest's a shadow cast."
I'm a vagabond, a squatter, not a scrap a decent man,
I abandoned all my wisdom to recall it not again
For a chuckle of a rose and the only song I trust,
"All the world's a glance of friend's face, all the rest's a shadow cast."
I am treading down a graveyard where all my friends have got,
Ask the dead about love is what I can do, can I not?
And the skull is crying out from the mound, from the past,
"All the world's a glance of friend's face, all the rest's a shadow cast."
Moon is waving, moon is whirling shallow streams on smoky lake,
Nightingales in cypress crowns turned to silence, though awake,
Only one kept singing loud, one who started singing last,
"All the world's a glance of friend's face, all the rest's a shadow cast."