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:
- Poem of Joys. by Walt Whitman
- In The Night by Stevie Smith
- I met a seer by Stephen Crane
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Переселение
- A Wicker Basket by Robert Creeley
- A man who set his journey back to time by Preeth Nambiar
- On The Final Submission Of The Tyrolese by William Wordsworth
- Юнна Мориц – Разноцветные котята
- America by Tony Hoagland
- Владимир Высоцкий – Очи чёрные: Часть I
- Valediction Forbidding Mourning
- The Cornfields by Vachel Lindsay
- Rain After a Vaudeville Show by Stephen Vincent Benet
- Николай Карамзин – Эпитафия (Он жил в сем мире для того)
- Новелла Матвеева – Восток, прошедший чрез воображенье
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
- Screw-Guns by Rudyard Kipling
- Russia To The Pacifists by Rudyard Kipling
- Route Marchin’ by Rudyard Kipling
- Romulus and Remus by Rudyard Kipling
- Road-Song of the Bandar-Log by Rudyard Kipling
- Rimmon by Rudyard Kipling
- Rimini by Rudyard Kipling
- Recessional (A Victorian Ode) by Rudyard Kipling
- Recessional by Rudyard Kipling
- Rebirth by Rudyard Kipling
- Puck’s Song by Rudyard Kipling
- Public Waste by Rudyard Kipling
- Prophets at Home by Rudyard Kipling
- Prelude by Rudyard Kipling
- Possibilities by Rudyard Kipling
- Poor Honest Men by Rudyard Kipling
- Philadelphia by Rudyard Kipling
- Pagett, M.P. by Rudyard Kipling
- Outsong in the Jungle by Rudyard Kipling
- Our Fathers Also by Rudyard Kipling
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