A poem by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) , the greatest English poet of “Augustan” or Georgian period
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Whether he thinks to little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself, abus’d or disabus’d;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.
A few random poems:
- Владимир Степанов – Как живете? Что жуете?
- Виктор Гончаров – Скоро, скоро я домой поеду
- Sonnet 21 poem – John Milton poems
- Robert Burns: The Song Of Death: Scene-A Field of Battle. Time of the day-evening. The wounded and dying of the victorious army are supposed to join in the following song.
- Sea Dreams poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Psalm 87 poem – John Milton poems
- Binsey Poplars poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Алексей Жемчужников – Заметки о некоторой публицистике
- To Make A Dadist Poem by Tristan Tzara
- Influence
- To The Rev. Mr. Newton : An Invitation Into The Country by William Cowper
- Sestina Otiosa by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Neighing at the Slope by Mahmoud Darwish
- The Innocent Ill
- Dirge of the Three Queens by William Shakespeare
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
- To A Little Girl That Has Told A Lie
- Guillaume de Lorris Belated: A Vision of Italy by Ezra Pound
- An Ode to the Democratic Rat
- Sonnet, an encyclopedic definition
- To A Feminist
- 对于女权主义者
- To the Rat’s Pencil
- 致老鼠的铅笔
- Toward Salvation
- My rat
- I Love My Rat
- 我爱我的老鼠
- Афанасий Фет – Сад весь в цвету
- Impostor’s Coronation
- Monster’s Cave
- 白色四月
- White April
- 我被包围了
- Surrounded
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

Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) was a a post-Restoration English poet and satirist. He is a poet of the (British) Augustan period and one of its greatest artistic exponents.