Standardization

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.

Poetry Monster – Home

A few random poems:

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 

• Harrow-on-the-Hill poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Guilt poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Felixstowe, or The Last of Her Order poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Executive poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Dilton Marsh Halt poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Diary of a Church Mouse poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Devonshire Street W.1 poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Death In Leamington poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Dawlish poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Cornish Cliffs poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Christmas poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Business Girls poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Back From Australia poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• An Edwardian Sunday, Broomhill, Sheffield poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• A Subaltern’s Love Song poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• A Shropshire Lad poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• A Bay In Anglesey poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry by John Betjeman
• Free the Holy Land — a poem about Palestine by Fledermaus
• Sepukku by Ураний
• Did Shakespeare write his own plays and poems? by Fledermaus

More external links (open in a new tab):

Russian Commerce Agency

Dealing Monster

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

Poems by Author and Category

The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works