A poem by Alec Derwent-Hope (1907–2000)
by Alec Derwent Hope
When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age,
The journalist with his marketable woes
Fills up once more the inevitable page
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose;
Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop
With horror at the house not made with hands
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup
Another pure theosophist demands
Rebirth in other, less industrial stars
Where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone
And films and sleek miraculous motor cars
And celluloid and rubber are unknown;
When from his vegetable Sunday School
Emerges with the neatly maudlin phrase
Still one more Nature poet, to rant or drool
About the “Standardization of the Race”;
I see, stooping among her orchard trees,
The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in,
Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees,
Pause and I see her grave malicious grin.
For there is no manufacturer competes
With her in the mass production of shapes and things.
Over and over she gathers and repeats
The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings.
She does not tire of the pattern of a rose.
Her oldest tricks still catch us with surprise.
She cannot recall how long ago she chose
The streamlined hulls of fish, the snail’s long eyes,
Love, which still pours into its ancient mould
The lashing seed that grows to a man again,
From whom by the same processes unfold
Unending generations of living men.
She has standardized his ultimate needs and pains.
Lost tribes in a lost language mutter in
His dreams: his science is tethered to their brains,
His guilt merely repeats Original Sin.
And beauty standing motionless before
Her mirror sees behind her, mile on mile,
A long queue in an unknown corridor,
Anonymous faces plastered with her smile.
A few random poems:
- The Name poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Bowling-Green by William Somervile
- Meditation With Feet
- Beachy Blues poem – Andrew Neil Maternick poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Garden poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Patterns poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Ballade Of The Dream poem – Andrew Lang poems
- As I Ponder’d in Silence. by Walt Whitman
- Francis II, King of Naples poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Bwoat by William Barnes
- An Essay On Criticism poem – Alexander Pope
- Илья Эренбург – О Москве
- Work in Game Design Rather Than Other Design
- Two Lacquer Prints poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- On the Idle Hill of Summer poem – A. E. Housman
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
- Italy poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Inspiration poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- In Uncertainty To A Lady poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Doors Of The Temple poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Darkness poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Crapulous Impression poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Complaint Of A Poet Manqué poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- By The Fire poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Books And Thoughts poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Anniversaries poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- A Melody By Scarlatti poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- A Little Memory poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- September
- Scenes Of The Mind
- Revelation
- Return From Business
- Private Property
- Points And Lines
- Poem
- Panic
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
Alec Derwent-Hope (1907–2000) was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.