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 Invention of Honey by Ricardo Sternberg
- My Bed is Covered Yellow by Peter Orlovsky
- Гавриил Державин – Жан Расин. Рассказ Терамена
- Words You Said poem – Andrew Neil Maternick poems | Poems and Poetry
- Summer by Pornika Ganguly
- Аnything can happen
- A Postcard From The Volcano by Wallace Stevens
- Robert Burns: Lovely Polly Stewart:
- Ode To Lycoris. May 1817 by William Wordsworth
- With Ships the Sea was Sprinkled Far and Nigh by William Wordsworth
- Иван Барков – Улика подьячего
- The Derelict by Rudyard Kipling
- Personal Talk by William Wordsworth
- Dinner in a Quick Lunch Room by Stephen Vincent Benet
- Memorials Of A Tour In Scotland, 1803 XIV. Fly, Some Kind Haringer, To Grasmere-Dale by William Wordsworth
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
- From the Mountain by Wang Wei
- For Mêng Hao-jan by Wang Wei
- Fine Apricot Lodge by Wang Wei
- Fields and Gardens by the River Qi by Wang Wei
- Farewell (II) by Wang Wei
- Chungnan by Wang Wei
- Birds Calling in the Ravine by Wang Wei
- An Evening in the Mountains by Wang Wei
- An Early Audience at the Palace of Light. (Harmonizing a poem for Secretary Jia Zhi.) by Wang Wei
- A View of the Han River by Wang Wei
- A Study by Wang Wei
- A Song of Peach-Blossom River by Wang Wei
- A Song of an Autumn Night. by Wang Wei
- A Song of a Girl from Loyang by Wang Wei
- A Song at Weicheng. by Wang Wei
- A Message to Commissioner Li At Zizhou by Wang Wei
- A Message from my Lodge at Wangchuan to Pei Di by Wang Wei
- A Green Stream. by Wang Wei
- A Farmhouse on the Wei River by Wang Wei
- A Reply by Wang Wei
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.