A poem by Alec Derwent-Hope (1907–2000)
by Alec Derwent Hope
When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age,
The journalist with his marketable woes
Fills up once more the inevitable page
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose;
Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop
With horror at the house not made with hands
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup
Another pure theosophist demands
Rebirth in other, less industrial stars
Where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone
And films and sleek miraculous motor cars
And celluloid and rubber are unknown;
When from his vegetable Sunday School
Emerges with the neatly maudlin phrase
Still one more Nature poet, to rant or drool
About the “Standardization of the Race”;
I see, stooping among her orchard trees,
The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in,
Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees,
Pause and I see her grave malicious grin.
For there is no manufacturer competes
With her in the mass production of shapes and things.
Over and over she gathers and repeats
The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings.
She does not tire of the pattern of a rose.
Her oldest tricks still catch us with surprise.
She cannot recall how long ago she chose
The streamlined hulls of fish, the snail’s long eyes,
Love, which still pours into its ancient mould
The lashing seed that grows to a man again,
From whom by the same processes unfold
Unending generations of living men.
She has standardized his ultimate needs and pains.
Lost tribes in a lost language mutter in
His dreams: his science is tethered to their brains,
His guilt merely repeats Original Sin.
And beauty standing motionless before
Her mirror sees behind her, mile on mile,
A long queue in an unknown corridor,
Anonymous faces plastered with her smile.
A few random poems:
- Такахама Кёси – Давнишний приятель
- Berck-Plage by Sylvia Plath
- On the Religious Memory of Mrs. Catherine Thomson, my Christian Friend, Deceased Dec. 16, 1646 poem – John Milton poems
- “`The smiling slopes with olive groves bedecked” poem – Alfred Austin
- Give Me Back My Rags by Vasko Popa
- Владимир Высоцкий – Дорожный дневник: Часть II
- Михаил Лермонтов – Война
- Erasing Amyloo by Russell Edson
- My Beach by Robert Saltzman
- Valley-dawn by Sunil Sharma
- A Subaltern’s Love Song poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
- Олег Бундур – Друзья
- Robert Burns: On The Death Of John M’Leod, Esq,: Brother to a young Lady, a particular friend of the Author’s.
- Robert Burns: Braving Angry Winter’s Storms:
- Dreadful by Shel Silverstein
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
- Notes for Canto CXX poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Nicotine poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Meditatio poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Medallion poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Masks poem – Ezra Pound poems
- L’Art poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Lament of the Frontier Guard poem – Ezra Pound poems
- La Regina Avrillouse poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Ione, Dead the Long Year poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Invern poem – Ezra Pound poems
- In the Old Age of the Soul poem – Ezra Pound poems
- In Tempore Senectutis poem – Ezra Pound poems
- In A Station Of The Metro poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Part I) poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Historion poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Grace Before Song poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Further Instructions poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Francesca poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Ezra on the Strike poem – Ezra Pound 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
Alec Derwent-Hope (1907–2000) was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.