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:
- Владимир Высоцкий – Всё было не так, как хотелось вначале
- Astrophel And Stella; Sonnet CVIII by Sir Philip Sidney
- To A Feminist
- calling-the-spirits.html
- Владимир Высоцкий – В младенчестве нас матери пугали
- Tonight she remembers by Rita Odessa Villaruel
- A Hymn for Christmas Day by Thomas Chatterton
- Orlando Furioso Canto 5 by Ludovico Ariosto
- September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden
- An Invocation poem – Alexander Pushkin
- In Spring, Santa Barbara by Sara Teasdale
- On The Plethora Of Dryads by Sylvia Plath
- Written On A Blank Space At The End Of Chaucer’s Tale Of The Flowre And The Lefe poem – John Keats poems
- Verses On A Young Lady (playing harpsichord, and singing) by Tobias Smollett
- Three Sonnets Written In Mid-Channel poem – Alfred Austin
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
- Dancing by Robert Hass
- Children Are Like Water by Robert Lloyd Jaffe
- Cascade by Robert Desnos
- Between The Wars by Robert Hass
- What We Leave Behind by Robert Saltzman
- Water by Robert Lowell
- Waking in the Blue by Robert Lowell
- The Wound by Robert McNamara
- The Withdrawal by Robert Lowell
- The Ruins Of Time by Robert Lowell
- The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket by Robert Lowell
- The Drunken Fisherman by Robert Lowell
- Skunk Hour by Robert Lowell
- Promise Me Rain Retold by Roberto Cocina
- San Francisco Night Windows by Robert Penn Warren
- True Love by Robert Penn Warren
- Tell Me a Story by Robert Penn Warren
- Mortal Limit by Robert Penn Warren
- Evening Hawk by Robert Penn Warren
- A Way to Love God by Robert Penn Warren
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