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:
- John Barleycorn: A Ballad by Robert Burns
- Михаил Лермонтов – Арфа
- Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild, Wild Women by Anne Sexton
- Юнна Мориц – Малиновая кошка
- greek_light.html
- Far In a Western Brookland poem – Alfred Edward Housman
- Her Vision In The Wood by William Butler Yeats
- The New Decalogue poem – Ambrose Bierce poems | Poems and Poetry
- Fairyland by Rabindranath Tagore
- Music poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Prologue spoken at the Theatre of Dumfries by Robert Burns
- the_emigrant.html
- Brooklyn Narcissus by Paul Blackburn
- Владимир Маяковский – Шляпами панов не забить… (РОСТА №222)
- Sheep In Fog by Sylvia Plath
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
- Шекспир – Уж если ты разлюбишь – Сонет 90
- Шекспир – У сердца с глазом тайный договор – Сонет 47
- Шекспир – У бедной музы красок больше нет – Сонет 103
- Шекспир – Ты положи с моей любовью рядом – Сонет 117
- Шекспир – Считать часы и спрашивать – Сонет 58
- Шекспир – С любовью связан жизненный мой путь – Сонет 92
- Шекспир – Разлука сердце делит пополам – Сонет 39
- Шекспир – Проснись, любовь – Сонет 56
- Шекспир – Про черный день – Сонет 63
- Шекспир – Пример тебе подобной красоты – Сонет 84
- Шекспир – Прекрасный облик в зеркале ты видишь – Сонет 3
- Шекспир – По совести скажи – Сонет 10
- Шекспир – Но не боюсь и смерть – Сонет 80
- Шекспир – Неужто я, приняв любви венец – Сонет 114
- Шекспир – Не позволяю помыслам ревнивым – Сонет 57
- Шекспир – Мой глаз гравером стал – Сонет 24
- Шекспир – Мои глаза в тебя не влюблены – Сонет 141
- Шекспир – Мне показалось, что была зима – Сонет 97
- Шекспир – Меня не радует твоя печаль – Сонет 34
- Шекспир – Любовь – не кукла жалкая в руках – Сонет 116
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.