Six short lines, and by the end the speaker has founded a religion. The poem is built like a joke, with the punchline held back until the final phrase. A voice demands women, wine and snuff, and says he will keep taking them until he cries "hold, enough!" Then he cancels the limit he has just set. Whoever is serving him may carry on "Till the day of resurrection." The central idea is appetite promoted to devotion: for this speaker, pleasure is a creed.
The construction is as simple as a drinking song. Three rhyming couplets run in lines of about eight syllables, with a bouncy, nearly sing-song beat. The first line is a syllable short and opens with a stress: "GIVE me women, wine, and snuff." It sounds like a fist on a tavern table. The list itself is carefully ordered. "Women" and "wine" are linked by their w sounds and have a certain glamour. Then "snuff" arrives as a blunt, one-beat noun, and the list drops from romance and revelry to a pinch of powdered tobacco. That small comic deflation tells us the speaker's tastes are hearty rather than refined. The rhyme of "snuff" with "enough" adds a joke of its own. "Enough" is the one thing he claims never to want, yet the word is tied by sound to the thing he craves.
The second couplet turns grand. "Sans objection" borrows a French word and the stiff language of legal permission, as though the speaker were signing a contract. The rhyme "objection / resurrection" is longer and more rolling than the others, and the words seem to stretch out like the indulgence they describe. "Resurrection" also does something clever with the earlier promise. If he will only cry "enough" at the end of time, he will never cry it at all. The limit exists in the grammar of the poem but not in the speaker's plans.
All of this prepares the last couplet, which supplies the religion. "Bless my beard" is a mock oath, and it suggests a bluff, hearty character, though the poem gives us no details about him beyond that voice. "Aye," meaning "always," has an old-fashioned ring and quietly doubles as a word of agreement. Then comes "My beloved Trinity," shorter than the lines before it, landing like an amen. Looking back, the sacred vocabulary was building all along: "resurrection" comes before the Trinity is named, and the three items on the opening list now stand in for three persons. "Beloved" sounds like a word from a church service. The effect is irreverent but good-humoured, since the holy words are borrowed to bless something cheerfully earthly.
The poem is also significant for what it shows about its poet. Keats is best known for sensuous, searching poems, and the wish for "a draught of vintage" in "Ode to a Nightingale" shows his interest in wine and physical delight. In those poems, though, pleasure is shadowed by thoughts of time and loss. Here the same hunger appears in comic form with the shadow removed. The speaker simply pushes mortality out of reach by setting his limit at the last trumpet. Whatever the occasion for the verse (the poem doesn't say), it reads like a throwaway, a piece of play that nonetheless shows real control.
For students, the poem is a useful lesson in how tone is made. Nothing in it is complicated, yet the French "sans," the legal-sounding "objection," the stretched rhyme and the sudden theology all work together to make mock-solemnity out of a wish for a good time. In six lines the poem lets us see how much humour can come from diction and rhyme, and how closely it can sit beside the language of faith.