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:
- The Grauballe Man by Seamus Heaney
- Аля Кудряшева – Какое там говорить. Я дышу с трудом
- Ок Мельникова – Подростковые драмы
- How Soon Hath Time poem – John Milton poems
- Ольга Берггольц – Песня о ленинградской матери
- Miscast II poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Владимир Высоцкий – Заключительная песня Кэрролла
- Robert Burns: Halloween: The following poem will, by many readers, be well enough understood; but for the sake of those who are unacquainted with the manners and traditions of the country where the scene is cast, notes are added to give some account of the principal charms and spells of that night, so big with prophecy to the peasantry in the west of Scotland. The passion of prying into futurity makes a striking part of the history of human nature in its rude state, in all ages and nations; and it may be some entertainment to a philosophic mind, if any such honour the author with a perusal, to see the remains of it among the more unenlightened in our own.-R.B.
- Through Liberty To Light poem – Alfred Austin
- Psalm 19: Coeli Enarrant by Sir Philip Sidney
- Proud Music of The Storm by Walt Whitman
- Spenserian Stanzas On Charles Armitage Brown poem – John Keats poems
- Faces. by Walt Whitman
- Олег Бундур – Силачи
- Robert Burns: Epistle To Colonel De Peyster:
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
- Владимир Костров – Мы на тяге ракетной берёзовых дров
- Владимир Костров – Душа, не кайся и не майся
- Владимир Костров – До чего нестерпимо и жёстко подуло
- Владимир Костров – Что может знать чужак
- Владимир Костров – Ботанический сад МГУ
- Владимир Костров – Бедное сердце болит спозаранку
- Владимир Костров – 1380 год
- Владислав Крапивин – Все спит в тропической ночи
- Владислав Крапивин – В южных морях и у севера дальнего
- Владислав Крапивин – Тяжелый толчок и вспышка у глаз
- Владислав Крапивин – Спокойная ночь
- Владислав Крапивин – Рыжий конь
- Владислав Крапивин – Под ветрами нам плыть
- Владислав Крапивин – На Диком Западе
- Владислав Крапивин – Маленький принц
- Владислав Крапивин – Когда тебя замучил враг
- Владислав Крапивин – Гонка
- Владислав Крапивин – Было все хорошо до недавней поры
- Владислав Крапивин – А по ночам у высокого плетня
- Владимир Вологдин – Не играйте, мальчики, в войну
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.