Burns’s speaker flatly refuses battlefield glory. He hates murder by flood or field, however much fame tries to dress it up. His blood belongs to the “life-giving wars of Venus”—a cheeky way of saying he’d rather make love than war. The gods he truly worships are peace and plenty, and he gets far more satisfaction from creating one new life than from taking twenty. The mood is playful, warm, and unapologetically anti-heroic.
The second stanza sharpens the point with famous deaths he’d never choose: Socrates, Leonidas, Cato—those celebrated martyrs and patriots. Instead, he longs for “bold Zimri’s fate, within the arms of Cozbi.” In the Bible, Zimri was killed in the act with a Midianite woman, but Burns winks at the story, turning it into a fantasy of dying in a lover’s embrace. It’s a mischievous, life-loving poem that treats glory and heroic death as fool’s errands, while intimacy and joy are the only true altars.