Love & Passion Quote by Ben Jonson

Flirtation becomes a sacrament here: Jonson takes the most ordinary ritual of sociability, the toast, and makes it almost embarrassingly intimate. “Drink to me only with thine eyes” is a sly escalation. The line pretends to renounce the body (no actual drinking, no actual touch) while smuggling in something hotter: the gaze as contact, the look as a kind of sip. It’s courtly love with a playwright’s sense of staging - a public gesture (a pledge) rewritten as private voltage.

The subtext is less “I’m above wine” than “I want a purer intoxication.” Jonson’s speaker isn’t rejecting pleasure; he’s upgrading it. A “kiss…in the cup” is brilliant because it’s both chaste and not chaste at all: a kiss displaced onto an object that can be passed, tasted, shared. The cup becomes a prop that lets desire travel while keeping manners intact. That’s the Jacobean trick - erotic charge inside a polite container.

Context matters: Jonson wrote for a culture obsessed with performance, reputation, and coded speech. “Thine” and “pledge” give the exchange a ceremonial gravity, as if two people are making vows in miniature over a table. The refusal to “look for wine” lands as a gentle boast of devotion, but it’s also a power move: the beloved’s attention is positioned as sufficient, even superior, to literal intoxication. Desire doesn’t need to break the rules when it can rewrite them.