Saint Patrick was a gentleman, who through strategy and stealth Drove all the snakes from Ireland, here's a drink to his health! But not too many drinks, lest we lose ourselves and then Forget the good Saint Patrick, and see them snakes again!

This is a traditional St. Patrick’s Day drinking toast, circulating in oral and popular print culture as an anonymous rhyme. It plays on the well-known legend that St. Patrick “drove the snakes out of Ireland,” a story generally understood as symbolic (often read as the banishment of paganism) rather than literal natural history. The verse is typically recited in convivial settings—pubs, dinners, parades—where toasts to St. Patrick are customary. Its punchline adds a temperance-minded caution: celebrate with drink, but not to excess, or one may “see snakes again,” invoking the imagery of drunken hallucination and the return of what Patrick supposedly expelled.

The rhyme balances celebration and self-policing. It praises St. Patrick as a clever, effective civilizing hero (“strategy and stealth”) and invites communal festivity (“here’s a drink to his health”), but immediately undercuts unrestrained revelry. The “snakes” operate on two levels: the legendary creatures Patrick banished and the figurative “snakes” of intoxication—loss of self-command, moral backsliding, or even delirium. The humor depends on this double meaning, turning a pious toast into a reminder that excess can undo the very virtues the saint represents. In that sense, it’s a comic, folk-form temperance lesson embedded within holiday ritual.