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:
- The Man Who Dreamed Of Faeryland by William Butler Yeats
- Nothing is Real by Rixa White
- Алексей Ржевский – Сонет, три разные системы заключающий
- Perfections. by Walt Whitman
- Love’s Fitfulness poem – Alfred Austin
- Ghazal of Rumi by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- Outside the Window, Snow
- A March in the Ranks, Hard-prest. by Walt Whitman
- At a Dinner Party poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- Степан Щипачев – Застольное слово
- Assurances. by Walt Whitman
- Валерий Брюсов – Есть поразительная белость
- Whispers of Immortality by T. S. Eliot
- Ольга Берггольц – Подбирают фомки и отмычки
- Olney Hymn 27: Welcome To The Table by William Cowper
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
- Tom The Lunatic by William Butler Yeats
- Tom O’Roughley by William Butler Yeats
- To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time by William Butler Yeats
- To Dorothy Wellesley by William Butler Yeats
- To Be Carved On A Stone At Thoor Ballylee by William Butler Yeats
- To A Young Girl by William Butler Yeats
- To A Young Beauty by William Butler Yeats
- To A Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators Of His And Mine by William Butler Yeats
- To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing by William Butler Yeats
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
- Poems by William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience and the Book of Thel
- Written In March by William Wordsworth
- To the City of London by William Dunbar
- To a Lady by William Dunbar
- The Sirens’ Song by William Browne
- The Rose by William Browne
- The Quarry by William Vaughn Moody
- The Daguerreotype by William Vaughn Moody
- The Blues by William Matthews
- Song by William Browne
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.