"You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse I made a Second Marriage in my house; favored old barren reason from my bed, and took the daughter of the vine to spouse"

A voice of defiance and renewal speaks here, a pivot from sterile certainty to a richer, riskier way of being. The speaker confesses to a decisive turn: after a first union with rationalism, he undertakes a Second Marriage, an audacious celebration, binding himself instead to the daughter of the vine. That spouse is wine, of course, but also what wine symbolizes: warmth, immediacy, ecstasy, fellowship, poetic insight, even the divine intoxication of mystic experience.

Old barren reason is not merely criticized; it is dismissed from the bed, the most intimate space. Barren suggests a kind of spiritual infertility, logic that can parse and analyze yet cannot beget solace, wonder, or love. The house stands for the self, the interior life; the bed for the heart’s deepest commitments. To drive reason from that bed is to refuse a cold marriage to abstraction. To take the vine’s daughter as spouse is to pledge fidelity not to occasional indulgence but to a mode of existence that bears fruit: laughter, song, compassion, and presence in the fleeting moment.

Brave carouse implies courage. Turning from approved disciplines to the tavern’s unruly wisdom risks social censure and self-doubt. Yet it is a brave act because mortality renders systems brittle; joy requires vulnerability. Friends are invoked to witness and perhaps join, reminding us that the wine of life is shared, communion rather than solitary intoxication.

Read plainly, it is a hedonist’s credo. Read more deeply, it is a critique of reason’s limits and a defense of the existential yes: when confronted with an unfathomable world, one can cling harder to abstractions or surrender to lived experience. The marriage to wine becomes a sacrament of immediacy, taste, touch, time, affirming that wisdom is not only thought but felt, sung, and sipped before the cup returns to dust.