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:
- bells_pool_and_sleep.html
- Honeycomb
- conference_swan_beauty.html
- An Appearance by Sylvia Plath
- Inscribed on a Work of Hannah More’s by Robert Burns
- Гавриил Державин – На возвращение графа Зубова из Персии
- Виталий Тунников – Бумеранг
- Владимир Маяковский – Донецкий шахтер голодает… (РОСТА №619)
- On Calais Sands poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Two Quits And A Drum And Elegy For Drinkers
- Peddler Road Flyover by Vinita Agrawal
- Иван Киуру – Ершок с вершок
- Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady poem – Alexander Pope
- I, or Someone Like Me by Marvin Bell
- On the Building of Springfield by Vachel Lindsay
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
- Ballade Made In The Hot Weather by William Ernest Henley
- Back-View by William Ernest Henley
- Attadale, West Highlands by William Ernest Henley
- Arabian Night’s Entertainments by William Ernest Henley
- Apparition by William Ernest Henley
- Anterotics by William Ernest Henley
- Andante Con Moto by William Ernest Henley
- Allegro Maestoso by William Ernest Henley
- After by William Ernest Henley
- A Wink From Hesper by William Ernest Henley
- A Desolate Shore by William Ernest Henley
- A Child by William Ernest Henley
- A Bowl Of Roses by William Ernest Henley
- The Swamp Fox by William Gilmore Simms
- The Lost Pleiad by William Gilmore Simms
- The Decay Of A People by William Gilmore Simms
- The Bard by William Gilmore Simms
- The Angel Of The Church by William Gilmore Simms
- Sumter In Ruins by William Gilmore Simms
- Song In March by William Gilmore Simms
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.