The sins of Youth are hardly sins,
So frank they are and free.
‘T is but when Middle-age begins
We need morality.
Ah, pause and weigh this bitter truth:
That Middle-age, grown cold,
No comprehension has of Youth,
No pity for the Old.
Youth, with his half-divine mistakes,
She never can forgive,
So much she hates his charm which makes
Worth while the life we live.
She scorns Old Age, whose tolerance
And calm, well-balanced mind
(Knowing how crime is born of chance)
Can pardon all mankind.
Yet she, alas! has all the power
Of strength and place and gold,
Man’s every act, through every hour,
Is by her laws controlled.
All things she grasps with sordid hands
And weighs in tarnished scales.
She neither feels, nor understands,
And yet her will prevails!
Cold-blooded vice and careful sin,
Gold-lust, blind selfishness,–
The shortest, cheapest way to win
Some, worse than cheap, success.
Such are her attributes and aims,
Yet meekly we obey,
While she to guide and order claims
All issues of the day.
You seek for honour, friendship, truth?
Let Middle-age be banned!
Go, for warm-hearted acts, to Youth;
To Age,–to understand!

A few random poems:
- “For where, beneath one’s parent sky” poem – Alfred Austin
- Sleep Did Come Wi’ The Dew by William Barnes
- The Invention of Honey by Ricardo Sternberg
- Epigram—The Keekin Glass by Robert Burns
- Lament Of Mary Queen Of Scots by William Wordsworth
- The Wound-Dresser by Walt Whitman
- The Song of My Heart by Olawuyi Mutiu
- The New World by Philip Levine
- Growth: for Allen Qing Yuan by Mike Yuan
- Ugliest Man In Town by Shel Silverstein
- The Vier-Zide by William Barnes
- Can Sri Lankan Women Be Creative? Review From A Third World Country!
- Ballade Of The Bookworm poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Epic by Patrick Kavanagh
- Eden in Winter by Vachel Lindsay
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
- Infelix
- Hemlock Furrows
- Genius
- Fragment
- Dying
- Dreams Beauty
- Depths
- Battle Stars
- Aspiration
- Answer Me
- Adelina Patti
- The Nuclear Ghost Towns
- The Conditional
- The Ugly Little Bird
- Not A Star
- Mountain Wellhead
- Lightning In The Dark Night Skies
- In The Bus That Is Frantically Rushing From Cairo To Port Said
- Immoral Laboratories
- Hope
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.