Visions of Beauty, of Light, and of Love,
Born in the soul of a Dream,
Lost, like the phantom-bird under the dove,
When she flies over a stream-
Come ye through portals where angel wings droop,
Moved by the heaven of sleep?
Or, are ye mockeries, crazing a soul,
Doomed with its waking to weep?
I could believe ye were shadows of earth,
Echoes of hopes that are vain,
But for the music ye bring to my heart,
Waking its sunshine again.
And ye are fleeting. All vainly I strive
Beauties like thine to portray;
Forth from my pencil the bright picture starts,
And-ye have faded away.
Like to a bird that soars up from the spray,
When we would fetter its wing;
Like to the song that spurns Memory’s grasp
When the voice yearneth to sing;
Like the cloud-glory that sunset lights up,
When the storm bursts from its height;
Like the sheet-silver that rolls on the sea,
When it is touched by the night-
Bright, evanescent, ye come and are gone,
Visions of mystical birth;
Art that could paint you was never vouchsafed
Unto the children of earth.
Yet in my soul there’s a longing to tell
All you have seemed unto me,
That unto others a glimpse of the skies
You in their sorrow might be.
Vain is the wish. Better hope to describe
All that the spirit desires,
When through a cloud of vague fancies and schemes
Flash the Promethean fires.
Let me then think of ye, Visions of Light,
Not as the tissue of dreams,
But as realities destined to be
Bright in Futurity’s beams.
Ideals formed by a standard of earth
Sink at Reality’s shrine
Into the human and weak like ourselves,
Losing the essence divine;
But the fair pictures that fall from above
On the heart’s mirror sublime
Carry a signature written in tints,
Bright with the future of time.
And the heart, catching them, yieldeth a spark
Under each stroke of the rod-
Sparks that fly upward and light the New Life,
Burning an incense to God!
A few random poems:
- Ballade Of Queen Anne poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Daphnis And Chloe poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- The Self We Share by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- Robert Burns: On The Seas And Far Away:
- Николай Гумилев – Корабль
- A Hundred Years Hence by Rabindranath Tagore
- Олег Бундур – Сложный предмет
- Long For This World by Sophie Hannah
- Шекспир – Любовь к себе моим владеет взором – Сонет 62
- Portrait From The Infantry
- No Chance To A New Life by Rashmi Sreekumar
- Николай Тихонов – Когда уйду
- Alba poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Владимир Маяковский – Два не совсем обычных случая
- Picture-Show by Siegfried Sassoon
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Владимир Маяковский – Что значило “празднование новогоднее”?.. (РОСТА №672)
- Что такое хорошо и что такое плохо – Владимир Маяковский (Стих): Читать стихотворение на Poetry Monster
- Владимир Маяковский – Что такое II Интернационал?.. (РОСТА №133)
- Владимир Маяковский – Что сделать, чтоб Всероссийский съезд Советов… (РОСТА №662)
- Владимир Маяковский – Что может быть старей кустарей?.. (РОСТА №573)
- Владимир Маяковский – Что делать?.. (РОСТА №193)
- Владимир Маяковский – Что делать, чтоб сытому быть?.. (РОСТА №219)
- Владимир Маяковский – Что делать
- Владимир Маяковский – Чехарда в палате… (РОСТА №881)
- Владимир Маяковский – Четвертый вывоз
- Владимир Маяковский – Чемпионат всемирной классовой борьбы
- Владимир Маяковский – Чем отличается Красная Армия от царской?.. (РОСТА №559)
- Владимир Маяковский – Чье рождество
- Владимир Маяковский – Частушки (Милкой мне в подарок бурка…)
- Владимир Маяковский – Частушки
- Владимир Маяковский – Чаеуправление (реклама)
- Владимир Маяковский – Бюрократиада
- Владимир Маяковский – Было с белым много дел… (Главполитпросвет №44)
- Владимир Маяковский – Был без работы буржуям пир… (Главполитпросвет №24)
- Владимир Маяковский – Буржуй, прощайся с приятными деньками
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works
Adah Isaacs Menken (1835 – 1868) was an American actress and a performer, who painted painter and wrote a number of poems (31 published so far). She was supposedly the highest earning actress of her time. She was best known for her performance in the hippodrama Mazeppa (with libretto based on Pushkin’s work), it is said that the climax of the spectacle featured her apparently nude and riding a horse on stage. After great success for a few years with the play in New York and San Francisco, she appeared in a production in London and Paris, from 1864 to 1866. She was a friend of Alexander Dumas. Adah Menken died in Paris at the age of 33