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 – Помогите цинготным детям (Главполитпросвет №274)
- English Poetry. William Barnes. Third Collection. The Broken Heart. Уильям Барнс.
- Омар Хайям – Если есть у тебя для жилья закуток
- Above the Battle’s Front by Vachel Lindsay
- Lyonesse
- Riding Together by William Morris
- I Don’t Know If History Repeats Itself by Yehuda Amichai
- As the Bell Clinks by Rudyard Kipling
- The Frivolity of Dreaming by Mahi Chauhan
- Destiny poem – Zubair Ahmad Parray poems | Poetry Monster
- Philip Levine – Philip Levine
- Acceptance by Robert Frost
- Suggested by the Cover of a Volume of Keats’s poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Владимир Маяковский – Чем отличается Красная Армия от царской?.. (РОСТА №559)
- Николай Гумилев – Левин, Левин, ты суров
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
- Body Script by Satish Verma
- Blue Mountains by Satish Verma
- Blistering Attack by Satish Verma
- Blemishes by Satish Verma
- Battle For Madness by Satish Verma
- Bare Tongue by Satish Verma
- Backtracking by Satish Verma
- AWAY FROM HOME by Satish Verma
- Astigmatism by Satish Verma
- Armless Enemies by Satish Verma
- Animation by Satish Verma
- Ancient Sins by Satish Verma
- Anarchy by Satish Verma
- An Art by Satish Verma
- Afterimages by Satish Verma
- A Saint Between Us by Satish Verma
- A River Flows Underground by Satish Verma
- A Killing by Satish Verma
- A DARK HOUSE by Satish Verma
- A Civil War by Satish Verma
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.