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:
- The battle of fire by Tanisha Avarsekar
- I Have Become Very Hairy by Yehuda Amichai
- Gwain To Feäir by William Barnes
- As Toilsome I Wander’d. by Walt Whitman
- On Sitting Down To Read King Lear Once Again poem – John Keats poems
- Robert Burns: Sonnet Written On The Author’s Birthday, : On hearing a Thrush sing in his Morning Walk.
- Tumi Sandhyar Meghamala – You Are A Cluster Of Clouds – Translation by Rabindranath Tagore
- Mary, Pity Women! by Rudyard Kipling
- Ольга Седакова – Путешествие волхвов
- Омар Хайям – Лучше впасть в нищету, голодать или красть
- Владимир Набоков – Верба
- Sonnet : To Eva by Sylvia Plath
- Жан де Лафонтен – Дафнис и Алцимадура
- Fancy In Nubibus, Or The Poet In The Clouds by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Олег Григорьев – Зажав кузнечика в руке
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
- Slant by Stephen Dunn
- Poem For People That Are Understandably Too Busy To Read Poetry by Stephen Dunn
- Named by Stephen Dunn
- Landscape At The End Of The Century by Stephen Dunn
- I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone by Stephen Dunn
- Essay On The Personal by Stephen Dunn
- Biography In The First Person by Stephen Dunn
- At The Smithville Methodist Church by Stephen Dunn
- Allegory Of The Cave by Stephen Dunn
- The White Peacock by Stephen Vincent Benet
- The Quality of Courage by Stephen Vincent Benet
- The Innovator by Stephen Vincent Benet
- The Hemp by Stephen Vincent Benet
- The General Public by Stephen Vincent Benet
- The Fiddling Wood by Stephen Vincent Benet
- The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun by Stephen Vincent Benet
- The City Revisited by Stephen Vincent Benet
- The Breaking Point by Stephen Vincent Benet
- Talk by Stephen Vincent Benet
- Road and Hills by Stephen Vincent Benet
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

Alcaeus of Mytilene ( c. 625/620 – c. 580 Before Christ) ] was a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos who is credited with inventing the Alcaic stanza. He was included in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria.