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:
- Владимир Маяковский – Notre-Dame
- A June-Tide Echo poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- All through eternity by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- In Christ there is No East Or West by John Oxenham
- The Douglas Tragedy poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Reconciliation by William Butler Yeats
- On The Queen’s Visit To London, The Night Of The 17th March 1789 by William Cowper
- Sonnet, an encyclopedic definition
- Colors And Sounds
- Cholera Camp by Rudyard Kipling
- Poor Mailie’s Elegy by Robert Burns
- Robert Burns: Complimentary Epigram On Maria Riddell:
- Back To The Border
- Remembrance poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Corn by Sidney Lanier
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
- This Will Not Win Him by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- This we Have Now by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- This is Love by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- This Aloneness by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- There is a Way by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- There is a life-force within your soul by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- There is a Community of Spirit by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- There is a Candle in your Heart by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- There is a Candle in your Heart by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- There Are A Hundred Kinds Of Prayer (Quatrain in Farsi with English Translation) by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- The Freshness by Rumi
- The Breeze at Dawn by Jelaluddin Rumi
- The time has come for us to become madmen in your chain by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- The Taste of Morning by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- The springtime of Lovers has come by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- The Self We Share by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- The Seed Market by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- The ravings which my enemy uttered I heard within my heart by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- The beauty of the heart by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- A Stone I died by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
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.