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:
- Ольга Ермолаева – Симферопольский скорый
- Interlude: Songs Out Of Sorrow by Sara Teasdale
- Константин Бальмонт – На вершине
- A Tale Of True Love poem – Alfred Austin
- Николай Заболоцкий – Я не ищу гармонии в природе
- The Lew O’ The Rick by William Barnes
- Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling. by Walt Whitman
- Николай Карамзин – Эпитафия (Он жил в сем мире для того)
- Василий Курочкин – Старая песня
- Gratitude To The Unknown Instructors by William Butler Yeats
- The Lost Pleiad by William Gilmore Simms
- Sonnet 94: They that have power to hurt and will do none by William Shakespeare
- Mozart’s Grave poem – Alfred Austin
- Song—A Waukrife Minnie by Robert Burns
- On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins 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
- A Scot To Jeanne D’Arc poem – Andrew Lang poems
- A Portrait Of 1783 poem – Andrew Lang poems
- A Highly Valuable Chain Of Thoughts poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Young Love poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- Upon The Hill And Grove At Bill-borow poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- Upon An Eunuch; A Poet. Fragment poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- Translated poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- Tom May’s Death poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- To Songs At the Marriage Of The Lord Fauconberg And The Lady Mary Cromwell poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- To His Worthy Friend Doctor Witty Upon His Translation Of The Popular Errors poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- to_his_coy_mistress.html
- To His Noble Friend, Mr. Richard Lovelace, Upon His Poems poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- To Christina, Queen of Sweden poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- Thoughts in a Garden poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- The Unfortunate Lover poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- The Picture Of Little T.C. In A Prospect Of Flowers poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- The Mower’s Song poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- The Nymph Complaining For The Death Of Her Faun poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- The Mower To The Glo-Worms poem – Andrew Marvell 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.