A poem by Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)
I have run where festival was loud
With drum and brass among the crowd
Of panic revellers, whose cries
Affront the quiet of the skies;
Whose dancing lights contract the deep
Infinity of night and sleep
To a narrow turmoil of troubled fire.
And I have found my heart’s desire
In beechen caverns that autumn fills
With the blue shadowiness of distant hills;
Whose luminous grey pillars bear
The stooping sky: calm is the air,
Nor any sound is heard to mar
That crystal silence–as from far,
Far off a man may see
The busy world all utterly
Hushed as an old memorial scene.
Long evenings I have sat and been
Strangely content, while in my hands
I held a wealth of coloured strands,
Shimmering plaits of silk and skeins
Of soft bright wool. Each colour drains
New life at the lamp’s round pool of gold;
Each sinks again when I withhold
The quickening radiance, to a wan
And shadowy oblivion
Of what it was. And in my mind
Beauty or sudden love has shined
And wakened colour in what was dead
And turned to gold the sullen lead
Of mean desires and everyday’s
Poor thoughts and customary ways.
Sometimes in lands where mountains throw
Their silent spell on all below,
Drawing a magic circle wide
About their feet on every side,
Robbed of all speech and thought and act,
I have seen God in the cataract.
In falling water and in flame,
Never at rest, yet still the same,
God shows himself. And I have known
The swift fire frozen into stone,
And water frozen changelessly
Into the death of gems. And I
Long sitting by the thunderous mill
Have seen the headlong wheel made still,
And in the silence that ensued
Have known the endless solitude
Of being dead and utterly nought.
Inhabitant of mine own thought,
I look abroad, and all I see
Is my creation, made for me:
Along my thread of life are pearled
The moments that make up the world.
A few random poems:
- Владимир Высоцкий – Тексты для капустника к 5-летию Театра на Таганке
- Николай Языков – Весна
- Ulster by Rudyard Kipling
- Anterotics by William Ernest Henley
- Sonnet CIV by William Shakespeare
- Федор Сологуб – Под холодною властью тумана
- The Music Of The Rains – English Translation by Rabindranath Tagore
- The Sonnet, The Lady, And The Prince by William Alexander
- Sonnet 70: That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect by William Shakespeare
- Time by Vladimir Marku
- Song—Willie brew’d a Peck o’ Maut by Robert Burns
- The Campera, the Foreigner y el Novio by Marjorie Kanter
- Song—Sweet Afton by Robert Burns
- Cuchulan’s Fight With The Sea by William Butler Yeats
- Allegro Maestoso by William Ernest Henley
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
- A Mesh by Shahida Latif
- Tear of warm dew of mind by Seema Gupta
- Your Time’s Comin’ by Shel Silverstein
- Workin’ It Out by Shel Silverstein
- Who’s Taller? by Shel Silverstein
- Who does she think she is…. by Shel Silverstein
- When She Cries by Shel Silverstein
- Ugliest Man In Town by Shel Silverstein
- Tryin’ On Clothes by Shel Silverstein
- They’ve Put A Brassiere On A Camel by Shel Silverstein
- The Worlds Greatest Smoke Off by Shel Silverstein
- The Winner by Shel Silverstein
- The Voice by Shel Silverstein
- The Unicorn by Shel Silverstein
- The Sitter by Shel Silverstein
- The Perfect Wave by Shel Silverstein
- The Perfect High by Shel Silverstein
- The Oak and the Rose by Shel Silverstein
- The Nap Taker by Shel Silverstein
- The Monkey by Shel Silverstein
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

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894 – 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.