“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:
- Let It Be Forgotten by Sara Teasdale
- How Long by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- Алексей Толстой – Слепой
- A Theory Of Prosody by Philip Levine
- Юнна Мориц – Зейдер-Зее
- Владимир Маяковский – Странно… но верно
- Robert Burns: The Five Carlins: An Election Ballad
- Two Sisters Of Persephone by Sylvia Plath
- Strada’s Nightingale by William Cowper
- The Poet Angels Who Came To Dinner
- Song—A Man’s a Man for a’ that by Robert Burns
- Владимир Степанов – Осы
- Most Sweet it is by William Wordsworth
- Николай Заболоцкий – Как мыши с котом воевали
- Her Anxiety by William Butler Yeats
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
- Reproof: A Satire. by Tobias Smollett
- Tobias Smollett – Tobias Smollett
- Love Elegy (in imitation of Tibullus) by Tobias Smollett
- “Let the nymph still avoid and be deaf to the swain” by Tobias Smollett
- To Independence by Tobias Smollett
- “From the man whom I love, though my heart I disguise,” by Tobias Smollett
- “Come listen, ye students of every degree” by Tobias Smollett
- Blue-Eyed Ann by Tobias Smollett
- Advice: A Satire. by Tobias Smollett
- You Will Forget! by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- Words Of Love Forevermore by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- What Is Woman But A Song! by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- The Squirrel by Todd H. C. Fischer
- The Pulling Away by Timothy Cole
- The moon at noon by Tom Mukasa
- The Leather Suitcase by Tom Berman
- The Mocking Bird by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- The Heart That Is Pining by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- The Clime Of My Birth by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- The Bird Has Vanished by Timothy Thomas Fortune
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