A poem by Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)
Once more the windless days are here,
Quiet of autumn, when the year
Halts and looks backward and draws breath
Before it plunges into death.
Silver of mist and gossamers,
Through-shine of noonday’s glassy gold,
Pale blue of skies, where nothing stirs
Save one blanched leaf, weary and old,
That over and over slowly falls
From the mute elm-trees, hanging on air
Like tattered flags along the walls
Of chapels deep in sunlit prayer.
Once more … Within its flawless glass
To-day reflects that other day,
When, under the bracken, on the grass,
We who were lovers happily lay
And hardly spoke, or framed a thought
That was not one with the calm hills
And crystal sky. Ourselves were nought,
Our gusty passions, our burning wills
Dissolved in boundlessness, and we
Were almost bodiless, almost free.
The wind has shattered silver and gold.
Night after night of sparkling cold,
Orion lifts his tangled feet
From where the tossing branches beat
In a fine surf against the sky.
So the trance ended, and we grew
Restless, we knew not how or why;
And there were sudden gusts that blew
Our dreaming banners into storm;
We wore the uncertain crumbling form
Of a brown swirl of windy leaves,
A phantom shape that stirs and heaves
Shuddering from earth, to fall again
With a dry whisper of withered rain.
Last, from the dead and shrunken days
We conjured spring, lighting the blaze
Of burnished tulips in the dark;
And from black frost we struck a spark
Of blue delight and fragrance new,
A little world of flowers and dew.
Winter for us was over and done:
The drought of fluttering leaves had grown
Emerald shining in the sun,
As light as glass, as firm as stone.
Real once more: for we had passed
Through passion into thought again;
Shaped our desires and made that fast
Which was before a cloudy pain;
Moulded the dimness, fixed, defined
In a fair statue, strong and free,
Twin bodies flaming into mind,
Poised on the brink of ecstasy.

A few random poems:
- Ольга Седакова – Две книги я несу
- Robert Burns: Sonnet On Receiving A Favour: Addressed to Robert Graham, Esq. of Fintry.
- Константин Бальмонт – Нам нравятся поэты
- Владимир Маяковский – Жид
- Of Old Sat Freedom on the Heights poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath
- Enigma by Thomas Moore
- To Independence by Tobias Smollett
- Because I’ve Learned by William Ellery Leonard
- Love and Law by Vachel Lindsay
- The Happy Days When I Wer Young by William Barnes
- As I Watch’d the Ploughman Ploughing. by Walt Whitman
- The Manor Garden by Sylvia Plath
- When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes (Sonnet 29) by William Shakespeare
- Константин Бальмонт – Молитва
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
- Never Sure Which You Are by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Important thing’s in life by Martin Smith
- Nestling by Mark R Slaughter
- Images by Mary Etta Metcalf
- My Words Embrace by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Illusions by Mark R Slaughter
- My Mother On An Evening In Late Summer by Mark Strand
- If Only by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Morning by Mark R Slaughter
- I, or Someone Like Me by Marvin Bell
- Mending Socks by Martin Willitts Jr.
- He Said To by Marvin Bell
- Grumpy Old Man by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Manure by Mark R Slaughter
- Giving Myself Up by Mark Strand
- Mammary Tunes by Mark R Slaughter
- Ghosts by Martina Reisz Newberry
- Lines For Winter by Mark Strand
- From The Long Sad Party by Mark Strand
- Life, wait for me by Martin Zakovski
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
Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894 – 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.