“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:
- Sow by Sylvia Plath
- Олег Григорьев – Как вы думаете, где лучше тонуть
- A Late Walk by Robert Frost
- Как не бывает утро без рассвета
- My Partner in Crime by Rennu Ayyar
- Владимир Британишский – На Марсовом поле
- Michael: A Pastoral Poem by William Wordsworth
- On The Eating Of Mice by Russell Edson
- A Song To Eleonora Duse In “Francesca da Rimini ” by Sara Teasdale
- Duckweed Pond by Wang Wei
- A Sense of Humor by Vachel Lindsay
- The Dawn Of Gods Sabbath
- Ольга Берггольц – Триптих 1949 года
- Haiku by Robby Charters
- Вера Павлова – О чем
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
- Fault by Sara Teasdale
- Enough by Sara Teasdale
- Dust by Sara Teasdale
- Doubt by Sara Teasdale
- Did You Never Know? by Sara Teasdale
- Debt by Sara Teasdale
- Come by Sara Teasdale
- But Not To Me by Sara Teasdale
- Buried Love by Sara Teasdale
- Blue Squills by Sara Teasdale
- Because by Sara Teasdale
- Barter by Sara Teasdale
- At Midnight by Sara Teasdale
- Alone by Sara Teasdale
- After Parting by Sara Teasdale
- After Love by Sara Teasdale
- A November Night by Sara Teasdale
- A Cry by Sara Teasdale
- To Youth by Sarojini Naidu
- The Soul’s Prayer by Sarojini Naidu
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