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:
- Maple by Robert Frost
- The Chanpa Flower by Rabindranath Tagore
- Анатолий Жигулин – Марта, Марта! Весеннее имя
- Sonnet 150: O from what power hast thou this powerful might by William Shakespeare
- Cino poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Владимир Британишский – Клейнмихель
- Владимир Высоцкий – Запись в книге почётных гостей ВНИИФТРИ
- The Gipsy Trail by Rudyard Kipling
- The Upas Tree poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Оливер Голдсмит – Каждому по заслугам
- The Waist of Time by The Waist of Time
- The Boat by Rabindranath Tagore
- Иван Коневской – В небывалое
- Song II: Have No Thought for Tomorrow by William Morris
- ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE AND UNCERTAINTY OF RICHES by Abraham Cowley
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
- Consider This And In Our Time by W H Auden
- The Common Life by W H Auden
- Cocaine Lil and Morphine Sue by W H Auden
- Christmas Oratio by W H Auden
- Carry Her Over the Water by W H Auden
- Canzone by W H Auden
- Calypso by W H Auden
- Base Words Are Uttered by W H Auden
- Autumn Song by W H Auden
- August 1968 by W H Auden
- Atlantis by W H Auden
- As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden
- As We Like It by W H Auden
- As the poets have mournfully sung by W H Auden
- Are You There? by W H Auden
- After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics by W. H. Auden
- Academic Graffiti by W H Auden
- A Walk After Dark by W H Auden
- A New Year Greeting by W H Auden
- Continual Conversation With A Silent Man by Wallace Stevens
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.