A poem by Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)
(To J.S.)
Still life, still life … the high-lights shine
Hard and sharp on the bottles: the wine
Stands firmly solid in the glasses,
Smooth yellow ice, through which there passes
The lamp’s bright pencil of down-struck light.
The fruits metallically gleam,
Globey in their heaped-up bowl,
And there are faces against the night
Of the outer room–faces that seem
Part of this still, still life … they’ve lost their soul.
And amongst these frozen faces you smiled,
Surprised, surprisingly, like a child:
And out of the frozen welter of sound
Your voice came quietly, quietly.
“What about God?” you said. “I have found
Much to be said for Totality.
All, I take it, is God: God’s all–
This bottle, for instance …” I recall,
Dimly, that you took God by the neck–
God-in-the-bottle–and pushed Him across:
But I, without a moment’s loss
Moved God-in-the-salt in front and shouted: “Check!”
A few random poems:
- Алексей Толстой – Прогулка с подругой жизни
- Taking On by Satish Verma
- Николай Языков – С. П. Шевыреву (Тебе хвала, и честь, и слава)
- Iva’s Pantoum by Marilyn Hacker
- The Lie by Sir Walter Raleigh
- Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind by William Shakespeare
- Parting Words by Rabindranath Tagore
- The Sultans Palace
- Алишер Навои – Скиталец горький, страсть таю я
- Robert Burns: Had I The Wyte? She Bade Me:
- Self-Care for Creative Artists: 10 Reasons To Care About It
- In Midas’ Country by Sylvia Plath
- England! The Time Is Come When Thou Should’st Wean by William Wordsworth
- Touch-And-Go by Sylvia Plath
- Caught by Susan Adams
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
- Unlyric Love Song
- Tube Station
- To Be Blind
- The Man In The Bowler Hat
- the_children_look_at_the_parents.html
- The British
- symphony_in_red.html
- seaport.html
- sea.html
- quickstep.html
- polyphony_in_a_cathedral.html
- one_almost_might.html
- nursery_rhyme_for_a_twenty_first_birthday.html
- not_love_perhaps.html
- night_piece.html
- never.html
- music.html
- meeting.html
- last_word_to_childhood.html
- june_sick_room.html
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

Alcaeus of Mytilene ( c. 625/620 – c. 580 Before Christ) ] was a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos who is credited with inventing the Alcaic stanza. He was included in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria.