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:
- A Prayer in the Prospect of Death by Robert Burns
- A Girl Sang a Song poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- On Certain Ladies poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- South Wind by Siegfried Sassoon
- A Reminiscence poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- It Is a Beauteous Evening by William Wordsworth
- Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old by William Shakespeare
- Fear by Vinko Kalinić
- I Remember, I Remember by Thomas Hood
- Psalm 84 poem – John Milton poems
- Oh Unforgotten And Only Lover
- Валерий Брюсов – Фаэтон
- The Owl by Ted Hughes
- Николай Карамзин – Луизе в день ее рождения 13 генваря, при вручении ей подарка
- Владимир Маяковский – Слушай, наводчик
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
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: The Prelude poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII: 3. O Sorrow, cruel poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: Is it, then, regret for buried time poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 131. O living will that shalt endure poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 99. Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 95. By night we linger’d on the lawn poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 83. Dip down upon the northern shore poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 82. I wage not any feud with death poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 7. Dark house, by which once more I s poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 78. Again at Christmas did we weave poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 5. Sometimes I Hold it half a Sin poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 55. The wish, that of the living whol poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 54. Oh, yet we Trust that somehow Goo poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 45. The baby new to earth and sky poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 39. Old warder of these buried bones poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 2. Old Yew, which graspest at the sto poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 22. The path by which we twain did go poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 16. I Envy not in any Moods poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 15. To-night the winds begin to rise poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 126. Love is and was my Lord and King poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
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.