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:
- O Hymen! O Hymenee! by Walt Whitman
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песенка про прыгуна в длину
- The Ringlet poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- The Flower-School by Rabindranath Tagore
- Sonnet 56: Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said by William Shakespeare
- The Sun Underfoot Among The Sundews poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
- Arrival by William Carlos Williams
- A Sea-Shore Grave. To M. J. L. by Sidney Lanier
- The Gardener LXXVI: The Fair Was On by Rabindranath Tagore
- The Blind Man by Théophile Gautier
- Valedictory poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Илья Эренбург – Круг
- To the Same poem – John Milton poems
- Robert Burns: Lines Written Under The Picture Of The Celebrated Miss Burns:
- Joy of giving by Vinaya Kumar Hanumanthappa
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
- November by William Cullen Bryant
- Mutation by William Cullen Bryant
- Love and Folly by William Cullen Bryant
- June by William Cullen Bryant
- Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood by William Cullen Bryant
- William Cullen Bryant – William Cullen Bryant
- Hymn To Death by William Cullen Bryant
- Hymn of the City by William Cullen Bryant
- Consumption by William Cullen Bryant
- After a Tempest by William Cullen Bryant
- A Song of Pitcairn’s Island by William Cullen Bryant
- A Forest Hymn by William Cullen Bryant
- William Henry Davies
- The Example by William Henry Davies
- The Dark Hour by William Henry Davies
- The Child and the Mariner by William Henry Davies
- The Boy by William Henry Davies
- The Bird of Paradise by William Henry Davies
- The Best Friend by William Henry Davies
- Sweet Stay-at-Home by William Henry Davies
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