“Sounding through the silent dimness
Where I faint and weary lay,
Spake a poet: ‘I will lead thee
To the land of song to-day.'”
I
O bards! weak heritors of passion and of pain!
Dwellers in the shadowy Palace of Dreams!
With your unmated souls flying insanely at the stars!
Why have you led me lonely and desolate to the Deathless Hill of Song?
You promised that I should ring trancing shivers of rapt melody down to the dumb earth.
You promised that its echoes should vibrate till Time’s circles met in old Eternity.
You promised that I should gather the stars like blossoms to my white bosom.
You promised that I should create a new moon of Poesy.
You promised that the wild wings of my soul should shimmer through the dusky locks of the clouds, like burning arrows, down into the deep heart of the dim world.
But, O Bards! sentinels on the Lonely Hill, why breaks there yet no Day to me?
II
O lonely watchers for the Light! how long must I grope with my dead eyes in the sand?
Only the red fire of Genius, that narrows up life’s chances to the black path that crawls on to the dizzy clouds.
The wailing music that spreads its pinions to the tremble of the wind, has crumbled off to silence.
From the steep ideal the quivering soul falls in its lonely sorrow like an unmated star from the blue heights of Heaven into the dark sea.
O Genius! is this thy promise?
O Bards! is this all?
A few random poems:
- Man was made to Mourn: A Dirge by Robert Burns
- Омар Хайям – О, не растите дерево печали
- Sailing To Byzantium by William Butler Yeats
- Низами Гянджеви – О кипарис с плавной поступью мри
- Нина Воронель – Попытка отчаяния
- Hurting Dive by Satish Verma
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песня парня у обелиска космонавтам
- Ballades II – Of The Book-Hunter poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Chris’mas Invitation by William Barnes
- Dirge for Two Veterans. by Walt Whitman
- The Hospital On The Shore
- Николай Рубцов – Воробей
- Poetry of Our Time
- My Sad Captains by Thom Gunn
- Cavern in Paradise by Rita Odessa Villaruel
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 Deserted Garden
- The Bayadere
- The Aisne
- Tezcotzinco
- Sonnet Xvi Who Shall Invoke Her
- Sonnet Xv
- Sonnet Xiv
- Sonnet Xiii
- Sonnet Xii
- Sonnet Xi
- Sonnet X
- Sonnet Viii
- Sonnet Vii
- Sonnet Vi
- Sonnet V
- Sonnet Ix
- Sonnet Iv
- Sonnet Iii
- Sonnet Ii
- Sonnet I
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