A poem by Alexander Block – Alexandre Block – Alexandr Blok – Александр Блок
(1880-1921)
A girl sang a song in the temple’s chorus,
About men, tired in alien lands,
About the ships that left native shores,
And all who forgot their joy to the end.
Thus sang her clean voice, and flew up to the highness,
And sunbeams shined on her shoulder’s white —
And everyone saw and heard from the darkness
The white and airy gown, singing in the light.
And all of them were sure, that joy would burst out:
The ships have arrived at their beach,
The people, in the land of the aliens tired,
Regaining their bearing, are happy and reach.
And sweet was her voice and the sun’s beams around….
And only, by Caesar’s Gates — high on the vault,
The baby, versed into mysteries, mourned,
Because none of them will be ever returned.

A few random poems:
- Виктор Шамонин-Версенев – Заяц-врун
- Николай Гумилев – На берегу моря
- Sonnet 142: Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate by William Shakespeare
- Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old by William Shakespeare
- “Call Not The Royal Swede Unfortunate” by William Wordsworth
- Staffa poem – John Keats poems
- The springtime of Lovers has come by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- Ольга Седакова – Ни темной старины заветные преданья
- Song—O let me in this ae night by Robert Burns
- Round by Weldon Kees
- the_world.html
- Before a Midnight Breaks in Storm by Rudyard Kipling
- Adieu…, adieu…. by Vladimir Marku
- Николай Глазков – Была зима
- All In A Word
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
- Written In A Volume Of The Comtesse De Noailles
- Kyrenaikos
- With A Copy Of Shakespeares Sonnets On Leaving College
- Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty
- Vivien
- I Loved
- Virginibus Puerisque
- I Have A Rendezvous With Death
- Translations Dante Inferno Canto Xxvi
- Fragments
- To England At The Outbreak Of The Balkan War
- Eudaemon
- Tithonus
- The Wanderer
- The Torture Of Cuauhtemoc
- The Sultans Palace
- The Rendezvous
- The Old Lowe House Staten Island
- The Nympholept
- The Need To Love
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 Blok (1880-1921), also Block, was a Russian poet, writer, publicist, playwright, translator and literary critic. A classic of Russian literature.