A poem by Alan Seeger (1888-1916)
All that’s not love is the dearth of my days,
The leaves of the volume with rubric unwrit,
The temple in times without prayer, without praise,
The altar unset and the candle unlit.
Let me survive not the lovable sway
Of early desire, nor see when it goes
The courts of Life’s abbey in ivied decay,
Whence sometime sweet anthems and incense arose.
The delicate hues of its sevenfold rings
The rainbow outlives not; their yellow and blue
The butterfly sees not dissolve from his wings,
But even with their beauty life fades from them too.
No more would I linger past Love’s ardent bounds
Nor live for aught else but the joy that it craves,
That, burden and essence of all that surrounds,
Is the song in the wind and the smile on the waves.
A few random poems:
- Николай Гумилев – Ночь
- Robert Burns: Braw Lads O’ Galla Water:
- Bridal Song by William Shakespeare
- Epitaph for William Nicol, High School, Edinburgh by Robert Burns
- The Irish Unionist’s farewell to Greta Hellastrom in 1922 poem – John Betjeman poems
- How Distant by Philip Larkin
- The Results Of Thought by William Butler Yeats
- Оливер Голдсмит – Пыл упований людям дан
- The Temple of Fame poem – Alexander Pope
- Drowning. Not Waving by P.J.Reed
- In A Restaurant by Sara Teasdale
- Cold Eyes by Vaishnavi Prakash
- Enough by Sara Teasdale
- XVI: Some Verses: Of Conquerouris by William Alexander
- Le monstre by Patryck Froissart
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
- Teacher
- Sleep
- Ode To A Harmonica
- Intruder
- Do You Know What Its Like
- Hellcat
- Yours & Mine poem – Alice Fulton
- Woman In Front Of Poster Of Herself poem – Alice Notley
- Velocity Of Money poem – Allen Ginsberg
- The White Cliffs
- The Next Chance
- The Melancholy of Birth
- The islands of happiness
- The Internet Romance
- The End of the World
- The Terms In Which I Think Of Reality poem – Allen Ginsberg
- Tears
- Teachers Day special
- Succeeding Sentiments.
- Stalker poem – Alice Notley
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

Alan Seeger (1888-1916) was an American war poet who fought and died in World War I during the Battle of the Somme, serving in the French Foreign Legion. Seeger was the brother of Charles Seeger, a noted American pacifist and musicologist and the uncle of folk musician, Pete Seeger.