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:
- Hector The Collector by Shel Silverstein
- Нина Пикулева – Яна-Несмеяна
- The Masks of Love
- With No Experience In Such Matters by Stephen Dunn
- When Gassy Thompson Struck It Rich by Vachel Lindsay
- Юнна Мориц – Веселый завтрак
- Владимир Высоцкий – В тюрьме Таганской нас стало мало
- Алексей Николаевич Толстой – Колыбельная
- Sonnet 12 poem – John Milton poems
- Олег Бундур – Заботливая бабушка
- About The Nightingale by Samuel Coleridge
- In Sutton Woods poem – Alfred Austin
- Валерий Брюсов – Это было? Неужели?
- The Gardener LXXVI: The Fair Was On by Rabindranath Tagore
- Oh could my Mind
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
- The Beginning by Rabindranath Tagore
- The Astronomer by Rabindranath Tagore
- Religious Obsession — translation from Dharmamoha by Rabindranath Tagore
- Poems On Time by Rabindranath Tagore
- Poems On Man by Rabindranath Tagore
- Poems On Love by Rabindranath Tagore
- Poems On Life by Rabindranath Tagore
- Poems On Beauty by Rabindranath Tagore
- One Day In Spring…. by Rabindranath Tagore
- On The Nature Of Love by Rabindranath Tagore
- My Friend, Come In These Rains — English Translation by Rabindranath Tagore
- Lover’s Gifts LVI: The Evening Was Lonely by Rabindranath Tagore
- Lord Of My Life by Rabindranath Tagore
- Lamp Of Love by Rabindranath Tagore
- Kinu Goala’s Alley – English Translation by Rabindranath Tagore
- In The Dusky Path Of A Dream by Rabindranath Tagore
- In The Country – English Translation by Rabindranath Tagore
- I Found A Few Old Letters by Rabindranath Tagore
- I Cast My Net Into The Sea by Rabindranath Tagore
- Gift Of The Great – English Translation by Rabindranath Tagore
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.