Five short lines, and the poem is already a small comedy of exaggeration and deflation. It opens by hailing a "red-faced divinity" and then, in the same breath, calls him "the fool / who won a quart of sack." The title promises "Immortals," but what we get is a man with a flushed face and a prize of cheap-sounding drink. The poem's central idea lives in the gap between those two registers: whatever is godlike in people may look, from close up, like foolishness, and it shows itself in the company of friends, in arguing about what matters, and in the quiet that follows.
The first line is a sentence with no verb, just a label, as if the speaker were introducing one portrait in a gallery of drinkers. "Divinity" is the grand word and "fool" the deflating one, and the comma between them lets the two sit side by side without deciding which is true. "Red-faced" works both ways. It suggests wine, and it also suggests a flush of embarrassment or temper, which the poem picks up two lines later. The verb "won" matters too. He didn't buy the wine, he won it, so his good fortune is partly luck, and the poem has no interest in grand merit. "Sack" is an old word for a kind of wine, and its hard, clipped sound, echoed by "quart," makes the drink feel more like a plain object than a poetic one.
Then the speaker steps in: "He and I talk beauty / till we're both angry." The phrasing is the most interesting thing in the poem. We might expect "talk *about* beauty," but dropping the preposition makes it sound like "talk shop" or "talk politics," a subject you work at, a trade. It also hints at a well-worn habit between two people. The anger is the surprise. Beauty is supposed to soothe, but here it provokes, perhaps because each man cares about it too much to agree, or because words keep falling short of it. The poem never says what they disagree about, and that silence lets us imagine the quarrel for ourselves. The title suggests wine may be fuelling the heat, though the poem never says whether the sack gets opened.
What follows is the poem's real answer: "then walk in the fields." No one wins the argument, no one apologises, and no lesson is spelled out. Having talked about beauty until it hurts, they go and stand inside some. The sequence "till… then…" gives the poem a plain narrative rhythm, one thing happening after another, and the fields quietly settle the question the men couldn't.
The shape on the page supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the lines shrink as they go, from about nine syllables in the first to six, six, five and five. The long, ornate opening, with its stacked syllables in "di-vin-i-ty," gives way to short, mostly one-syllable lines, so the poem seems to lose steam the way a quarrel does. The last line, "then walk in the fields," is almost all single beats, and you can hear it as footsteps. There is also a neat frame in sound: the poem begins its journey with "fool" and ends on "fields," two words that share an opening *f* and sit at opposite ends of the poem like start and destination. The punctuation is just as spare, one comma and one full stop, so nothing interrupts the walk at the end.
The title may recall an older tradition of poets and drinkers being praised as immortals, but the poem works without that background. Its significance lies in how much it holds in so little space. It makes a modest, funny claim that immortality, if it exists, belongs to foolish, flushed-faced companions who care enough about beauty to fight over it. It also suggests that arguments about art are only half the story, and that the other half happens outdoors, with no words at all. Hardly a word in the poem is showy, yet it manages to be both a joke and a quiet credo, and it ends by trusting the fields to say what the men couldn't.