I
O crownless soul of Ishmael!
Uplifting and unfolding the white tent of dreams against the sunless base of eternity!
Looking up through thy dumb desolation for white hands to reach out over the shadows, downward, from the golden bastions of God’s eternal Citadel!
Praying for Love to unloose the blushing bindings of his nimble shaft and take thee up to his fullest fruition!
Poor Soul! hast thou no prophecy to gauge the distance betwixt thee and thy crown?
Thy crown?
Alas! there is none.
Only a golden-rimmed shadow that went before thee, marking in its tide barren shoals and dust.
At last resting its bright length down in the valley of tears.
Foolish soul! let slip the dusty leash.
Cease listening along the borders of a wilderness for the lost echoes of life.
Drift back through the scarlet light of Memory into the darkness once more.
A corpse hath not power to feel the tying of its hands.
II
To-night, O Soul! shut off thy little rimmings of Hope, and let us go back to our hemlock that sprang up in the furrows.
Let us go back with bleeding feet and try to break up the harvestless ridges where we starved.
Let us go down to the black sunset whose wings of fire burnt out thy flowery thickets of Day, and left a Night to swoop down the lonesome clouds to thee.
Go back to the desolate time when the dim stars looked out from Heaven, filmy and blank, like eyes in the wide front of some dead beast.
Go, press thy nakedness to the burnt, bare rocks, under whose hot, bloodless ribs the River of Death runs black with human sorrow.
To-night, O Soul! fly back through all the grave-yards of thy Past.
Fly back to them this night with thy fretful wings, even though their bloody breadth must wrestle long against Hell’s hollow bosom!
III
Jealous Soul!
The stars that are trembling forth their silent messages to the hills have none for thee!
The mother-moon that so lovingly reacheth down her arms of light heedeth not thy Love!
See, the pale pinions that thou hast pleaded for gather themselves up into rings and then slant out to the dust!
The passion-flowers lift up their loving faces and open their velvet lips to the baptism of Love, but heed not thy warm kisses!
Shut out all this brightness that hath God’s Beauty and liveth back the silence of His Rest.
Cease knocking at the starry gate of the wondrous realm of Song.
Hush away this pleading and this praying.
Go back to thy wail of fetter and chain!
Go back to thy night of loving in vain!
IV
O weak Soul! let us follow the heavy hearse that bore our old Dream out past the white-horned Daylight of Love.
Let thy pale Dead come up from their furrows of winding-sheets to mock thy prayers with what thy days might have been.
Let the Living come back and point out the shadows they swept o’er the disk of thy morning star.
Have thou speech with them for the story of its swimming down in tremulous nakedness to the Red Sea of the Past.
Go back and grapple with thy lost Angels that stand in terrible judgment against thee.
Seek thou the bloodless skeleton once hugged to thy depths.
Hath it grown warmer under thy passionate kissings?
Or, hath it closed its seeming wings and shrunk its white body down to a glistening coil?
Didst thou wait the growth of fangs to front the arrows of Love’s latest peril?
Didst thou not see a black, hungry vulture wheeling down low to the white-bellied coil where thy Heaven had once based itself?
O blind Soul of mine!
V
Blind, blind with tears!
Not for thee shall Love climb the Heaven of thy columned Hopes to Eternity!
Under the silver shadow of the cloud waits no blushing star the tyrst.
Didst thou not see the pale, widowed West loose her warm arms and slide the cold burial earth down upon the bare face of thy sun?
Gazing upon a shoal of ashes, thou hast lost the way that struck upon the heavy, obstructive valves of the grave to thy Heaven.
Mateless thou needs must vaguely feel along the dark, cold steeps of Night.
Hath not suffering made thee wise?
When, oh when?
VI
Go down to the black brink of Death and let its cool waters press up to thy weary feet.
See if its trembling waves will shatter the grand repeating of thy earth-star.
See if the eyes that said to thee their speechless Love so close will reach thee from this sorrowful continent of Life.
See if the red hands that seamed thy shroud will come around thy grave.
Then, O Soul! thou mayst drag them to the very edges of the Death-pit, and shake off their red shadows!
Thy strong vengeance may then bind the black-winged crew down level with their beds of fire!
VII
But wait, wait!
Take up the ruined cup of Life that struck like a planet through the dark, and shone clear and full as we starved for the feast within.
Go down to the black offings of the Noiseless Sea, and wait, poor Soul!
Measure down the depth of thy bitterness and wait!
Bandage down with the grave-clothes the pulses of thy dying life and wait!
Wail up thy wild, desolate echoes to the pitying arms of God and wait!
Wait, wait!
A few random poems:
- I Keep Six Honest… by Rudyard Kipling
- A Japanese Wood-Carving poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Владимир Британишский – В Прикаспии
- To a Historian. by Walt Whitman
- Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf by Roald Dahl
- What would I do without this world by Samuel Beckett
- At The Locks Of The Void
- A Day on the Beach of War by Tony Stringfellow
- Advice to the Ladies by William Somervile
- Mutability by William Wordsworth
- Константин Бальмонт – Чудовище с клеймом
- Jerusalem Delivered – Book 04 – part 01 by Torquato Tasso
- A Week Later by Sharon Olds
- Ode On The Pleasure Arising From Vicissitude by Thomas Gray
- The Last Rhyme of True Thomas by Rudyard Kipling
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
- Harry Ploughman poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- God’s Grandeur poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- For A Picture Of St. Dorothea poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Felix Randal poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Epithalamion poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Easter Communion poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Duns Scotus’s Oxford poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Denis poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Cheery Beggar poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Carrion Comfort poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Brothers poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Binsey Poplars poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Barnfloor and Winepress poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- At The Wedding March poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Ash-Boughs poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- As Kingfishers Catch Fire poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Andromeda poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- You Ask Me, Why, Tho’ Ill at Ease poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Ulysses poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- To Virgil, Written at the Request of the Mantuans for the N poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
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