Standardization

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.

Poetry Monster – Home

A few random poems:

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 

• Arms and the Man by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• Arcady Unheeding by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• Ancient History by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• Ancestors by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• An Old French Poet by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• Alone by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• Aftermath by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• Absolution by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• A Working Party by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• A Whispered Tale by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• A Wanderer by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• A Subaltern by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• A Poplar and the Moon by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• A Mystic As Soldier by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• A Letter Home by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• A Child’s Prayer by Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon
• Night Launch by Sonya Ki Tomlinson by Poetry In English
• Long For This World by Sophie Hannah by Poetry In English
• LIGHT ECHOES by Sonya Ki Tomlinson by Poetry In English
• Life Brings Me to this Journey. by Stephen Sweitzer by Poetry In English

More external links (open in a new tab):

Russian Commerce Agency

Dealing Monster

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

Poems by Author and Category

The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works