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 Thief
- The Street Sounds to the Soldiers’ Tread poem – A. E. Housman
- The Hearth Eternal by Vachel Lindsay
- Николай Огарев – Смутные мгновенья
- At First. To Charlotte Cushman. by Sidney Lanier
- Robert Burns: Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat?:
- Ольга Седакова – Ни темной старины заветные преданья
- Sonnet CVII by William Shakespeare
- Олег Митяев – Француженка
- Ярослав Смеляков – Стихи, написанные в псковской гостинице
- Moonrise by Yvor Winters
- William Allingham – William Allingham
- Aftermath by Sylvia Plath
- Make Love and War by Michael O’Leary
- Олег Бундур – Умный кот
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
- Paris In Spring by Sara Teasdale
- Over The Roofs by Sara Teasdale
- Only In Sleep by Sara Teasdale
- On The Dunes by Sara Teasdale
- On The Death Of Swinburne by Sara Teasdale
- Oh Day Of Fire And Sun by Sara Teasdale
- Night Song At Amalfi by Sara Teasdale
- Night In Arizona by Sara Teasdale
- New Year’s Dawn – Broadway by Sara Teasdale
- Madeira From The Sea by Sara Teasdale
- Love In Autumn by Sara Teasdale
- Less Than The Cloud To The Wind by Sara Teasdale
- Interlude: Songs Out Of Sorrow by Sara Teasdale
- In The Train by Sara Teasdale
- In The Metropolitan Museum by Sara Teasdale
- In The End by Sara Teasdale
- Night Song At Amalfi by Sara Teasdale
- In the Carpenter’s Shop by Sara Teasdale
- Night In Arizona by Sara Teasdale
- In Spring, Santa Barbara by Sara Teasdale
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.