On the wooden deck of the wooden Junk, silent, alone, we lie,
With silver foam about the bow, and a silver moon in the sky:
A glimmer of dimmer silver here, from the anklets round your feet,
Our lips may close on each other’s lips, but never our souls may meet.
For though in my arms you lie at rest, your name I have never heard,
To carry a thought between us two, we have not a single word.
And yet what matter we do not speak, when the ardent eyes have spoken,
The way of love is a sweeter way, when the silence is unbroken.
As a wayward Fancy, tired at times, of the cultured Damask Rose,
Drifts away to the tangled copse, where the wild Anemone grows;
So the ordered and licit love ashore, is hardly fresh and free
As this light love in the open wind and salt of the outer sea.
So sweet you are, with your tinted cheeks and your small caressive hands,
What if I carried you home with me, where our Golden Temple stands?
Yet, this were folly indeed; to bind, in fetters of permanence,
A passing dream whose enchantment charms because of its trancience.
Life is ever a slave to Time; we have but an hour to rest,
Her steam is up and her lighters leave, the vessel that takes me west;
And never again we two shall meet, as we chance to meet to-night,
On the Junk, whose painted eyes gaze forth, in desolate want of sight.
And what is love at its best, but this? Conceived by a passing glance,
Nursed and reared in a transient mood, on a drifting Sea of Chance.
For rudderless craft are all our loves, among the rocks and the shoals,
Well we may know one another’s speech, but never each other’s souls.
Give here your lips and kiss me again, we have but a moment more,
Before we set the sail to the mast, before we loosen the oar.
Good-bye to you, and my thanks to you, for the rest you let me share,
While this night drifted away to the Past, to join the Nights that Were.
A few random poems:
- Sonnet, an encyclopedic definition
- In Memoriam 82: I Wage Not Any Feud With Death poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Departure by Sylvia Plath
- Омар Хайям – Не являй друзьям печальный вид
- Suicide In The Trenches by Siegfried Sassoon
- Lying on a Slab by Satish Verma
- Elixer Vitæ poem – Ambrose Bierce poems | Poems and Poetry
- These Are The Clouds by William Butler Yeats
- To A Young Friend, On His Arriving At Cambridge Wet, When No Rain Had Fallen There by William Cowper
- Making The Lion For All It’s Got — A Ballad poem – Allen Ginsberg
- Must Work by Steve Downes
- The Queen’s Men by Rudyard Kipling
- Written in March by William Wordsworth
- Sonnet III: Look In Thy Glass, and Tell the Face Thou Viewest by William Shakespeare
- I’ve Been Working So Hard by Shel Silverstein
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
- The Messiah : A Sacred Eclogue poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Looking-Glass. : on Mrs. Pulteney poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Iliad: Book VI (excerpt) poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Fable of Dryope – Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 9, [v. 324-393] poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Dying Christian to His Soul poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Dunciad: Book IV poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Dunciad: Book III. poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Dunciad: Book II. poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Dunciad: Book I. poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Challenge: A Court Ballad poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- The Basset-Table : An Eclogue poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Summer poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Summer – The Second Pastoral; or Alexis poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Summer – The Second Pastoral; or Alexis poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Spring – The First Pastoral ; or Damon poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Sound And Sense poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Song, by a Person of Quality poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Solitude: An Ode poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Solitude poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Sappho to Phaon (Ovid Heroid XV) poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
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
Violet Nicolson ( 1865 – 1904); otherwise known as Adela Florence Nicolson (née Cory), was an English poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of Laurence Hope, however she became known as Violet Nicolson. In the early 1900s, she became a best-selling author. She committed suicide and is buried in Madras, now Chennai, India.