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:
- Praises to my motherland ! by Neelam Sinha
- Sonnet 11 poem – John Milton poems
- The Statues by William Butler Yeats
- English Poetry. Richard Hovey. The Old Pine. Ричард Хави.
- On The Lord Gen. Fairfax At The Seige Of Colchester poem – John Milton poems
- The Squirrel by Todd H. C. Fischer
- You by Vladimir Mayakovsky
- Robert Burns: Written By Somebody On The Window Of an Inn at Stirling, on seeing the Royal Palace in ruin.: Of an Inn at Stirling, on seeing the Royal Palace in ruin.
- Robert Burns: A Dream: Thoughts, words, and deeds, the Statute blames with reason; But surely Dreams were ne’er indicted Treason. On reading, in the public papers, the Laureate’s Ode, with the other parade of June 4th, 1786, the Author was no sooner dropt asleep, than he imagined himself transported to the Birth-day Levee: and, in his dreaming fancy, made the following Address:
- Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 XIV. Fly, Some Kind Haringer, To Grasmere-Dale by William Wordsworth
- Владимир Набоков – Большая медведица
- I Know A Man by Yehuda Amichai
- Владимир Британишский – Историк и источник
- For the Young Who Want To by Marge Piercy
- Storm and Sunlight 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
- Otho The Great – Act II poem – John Keats poems
- Otho The Great – Act I poem – John Keats poems
- On Visiting The Tomb Of Burns poem – John Keats poems
- On Receiving A Laurel Crown From Leigh Hunt poem – John Keats poems
- On Receiving A Curious Shell poem – John Keats poems
- On Hearing The Bag-Pipe And Seeing “The Stranger” Played At Inverary poem – John Keats poems
- On Death poem – John Keats poems
- On A Dream poem – John Keats poems
- Ode. Written On The Blank Page Before Beaumont And Fletcher’s Tragi-Comedy ‘The Fair Maid Of The In poem – John Keats poems
- Ode To Apollo poem – John Keats poems
- O Blush Not So! poem – John Keats poems
- Lines Written In The Highlands After A Visit To Burns’s Country poem – John Keats poems
- Lines To Fanny poem – John Keats poems
- Lines Rhymed In A Letter From Oxford poem – John Keats poems
- Lines On Seeing A Lock Of Milton’s Hair poem – John Keats poems
- Lamia. Part II poem – John Keats poems
- Lamia. Part I poem – John Keats poems
- King Stephen poem – John Keats poems
- Isabella; Or, The Pot Of Basil: A Story From Boccaccio poem – John Keats poems
- I Stood Tip-Toe Upon A Little Hill poem – John Keats 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.