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:
- Death Of A Naturalist by Seamus Heaney
- French kiss to knickers poem – Andrew Vassell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Gardener LXIX: I Hunt for the Golden Stag by Rabindranath Tagore
- John Bleäke At Hwome At Night by William Barnes
- Fable Of The Rhododendron Stealers by Sylvia Plath
- Schoolroom On A Wet Afternoon by Vernon Scannell
- Roads poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Омар Хайям – Не являй друзьям печальный вид
- Thee, God, I Come from poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Tumi Sandhyar Meghamala – You Are A Cluster Of Clouds – Translation by Rabindranath Tagore
- Don’t fear death poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- Владимир Маяковский – Ты хочешь освободиться от тяжести войны?.. (РОСТА №523)
- Вероника Тушнова – Ты все еще тревожишься — что будет
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песня о планах
- An Untold Tale by Shahida Latif
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
- Of Three Or Four In The Room by Yehuda Amichai
- Near The Wall Of A House by Yehuda Amichai
- My Father by Yehuda Amichai
- My Child Wafts Peace by Yehuda Amichai
- Memorial Day For The War Dead by Yehuda Amichai
- Love Of Jerusalem by Yehuda Amichai
- Jerusalem by Yehuda Amichai
- If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem by Yehuda Amichai
- I Want To Die In My Own Bed by Yehuda Amichai
- I Know A Man by Yehuda Amichai
- I Have Become Very Hairy by Yehuda Amichai
- I Don’t Know If History Repeats Itself by Yehuda Amichai
- Half The People In The World by Yehuda Amichai
- God Has Pity On Kindergarten Children by Yehuda Amichai
- God Full Of Mercy by Yehuda Amichai
- Forgetting Someone by Yehuda Amichai
- Ein Yahav by Yehuda Amichai
- Do Not Accept by Yehuda Amichai
- Before by Yehuda Amichai
- And We Shall Not Get Excited by Yehuda Amichai
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.