Visions of Beauty, of Light, and of Love,
Born in the soul of a Dream,
Lost, like the phantom-bird under the dove,
When she flies over a stream-
Come ye through portals where angel wings droop,
Moved by the heaven of sleep?
Or, are ye mockeries, crazing a soul,
Doomed with its waking to weep?
I could believe ye were shadows of earth,
Echoes of hopes that are vain,
But for the music ye bring to my heart,
Waking its sunshine again.
And ye are fleeting. All vainly I strive
Beauties like thine to portray;
Forth from my pencil the bright picture starts,
And-ye have faded away.
Like to a bird that soars up from the spray,
When we would fetter its wing;
Like to the song that spurns Memory’s grasp
When the voice yearneth to sing;
Like the cloud-glory that sunset lights up,
When the storm bursts from its height;
Like the sheet-silver that rolls on the sea,
When it is touched by the night-
Bright, evanescent, ye come and are gone,
Visions of mystical birth;
Art that could paint you was never vouchsafed
Unto the children of earth.
Yet in my soul there’s a longing to tell
All you have seemed unto me,
That unto others a glimpse of the skies
You in their sorrow might be.
Vain is the wish. Better hope to describe
All that the spirit desires,
When through a cloud of vague fancies and schemes
Flash the Promethean fires.
Let me then think of ye, Visions of Light,
Not as the tissue of dreams,
But as realities destined to be
Bright in Futurity’s beams.
Ideals formed by a standard of earth
Sink at Reality’s shrine
Into the human and weak like ourselves,
Losing the essence divine;
But the fair pictures that fall from above
On the heart’s mirror sublime
Carry a signature written in tints,
Bright with the future of time.
And the heart, catching them, yieldeth a spark
Under each stroke of the rod-
Sparks that fly upward and light the New Life,
Burning an incense to God!
A few random poems:
- Letter to my father by Preeth Nambiar
- Temporary City by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Epitaph On A Free But Tame Redbreast, A Favourite Of Miss Sally Hurdis by William Cowper
- Watercolor Of Grantchester Meadows by Sylvia Plath
- A Song at Cock-Crow by Rudyard Kipling
- Владимир Гиляровский – Я эоловой арфы струна
- Sonnet III: With how sad steps by Sir Philip Sidney
- Long Long Ago by Robert Desnos
- In Honour of the City of London by William Dunbar
- Think of the Soul. by Walt Whitman
- Владимир Маяковский – Эй, онанисты, кричите «Ура!»
- The Hermit At Outermost House by Sylvia Plath
- Gratitude, Addressed To Lady Hesketh by William Cowper
- Philip Levine – Philip Levine
- Song—O Tibbie, I hae seen the day by Robert Burns
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
- A Cliff Dwelling by Robert Frost
- A Brook in the City by Robert Frost
- A Boundless Moment by Robert Frost
- The Easter Egg Hunt by Roger Turner
- Nikolai Gumilev –
- The Land of Counterpane by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Come, My Beloved, Hear From Me by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Come, Here Is Adieu To The City by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Come From The Daisied Meadows by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Block City by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Behold, As Goblins Dark Of Mien by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Before This Little Gift Was Come by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Away With Funeral Music by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Autumn Fires by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Auntie’s Skirts by Robert Louis Stevenson
- At the Sea-Side by Robert Louis Stevenson
- At Last She Comes by Robert Louis Stevenson
- As One Who Having Wandered All Night Long by Robert Louis Stevenson
- As In Their Flight The Birds Of Song by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Armies in the Fire by Robert Louis Stevenson
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
Adah Isaacs Menken (1835 – 1868) was an American actress and a performer, who painted painter and wrote a number of poems (31 published so far). She was supposedly the highest earning actress of her time. She was best known for her performance in the hippodrama Mazeppa (with libretto based on Pushkin’s work), it is said that the climax of the spectacle featured her apparently nude and riding a horse on stage. After great success for a few years with the play in New York and San Francisco, she appeared in a production in London and Paris, from 1864 to 1866. She was a friend of Alexander Dumas. Adah Menken died in Paris at the age of 33