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:
- To Mrs Reynolds’ Cat poem – John Keats poems
- A Story At Dusk
- Михаил Кузмин – Врач мудрый нам открыл секрет природы
- Nocturne by W H Auden
- Николай Языков – Песня (Пусть свободны и легки)
- The Spring by Thomas Carew
- Жан де Лафонтен – Орел и Сова
- Erin! The Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes by Thomas Moore
- Epigram on a Swearing Coxcomb by Robert Burns
- On Deck by Sylvia Plath
- I Want To Die In My Own Bed by Yehuda Amichai
- Merrow Down by Rudyard Kipling
- The Sound Of Music -a Ghazal by Umamaheswari Anandane
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 39. Old warder of these buried bones poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Song—Awa’, Whigs, Awa’ by Robert Burns
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 – Любовь к себе моим владеет взором – Сонет 62
- Шекспир – Люблю твои глаза – Сонет 132
- Шекспир – Люби другого – Сонет 139
- Шекспир – Лелеет лето лучший свой цветок – Сонет 94
- Шекспир – Как и любовь – Сонет 151
- Шекспир – Дыханье мысли и огонь желанья – Сонет 45
- Шекспир – Доверьем мнимым держится любовь – Сонет 138
- Шекспир – День без тебя казался ночью – Сонет 43
- Шекспир – Чтобы стихи, рожденные когда-то – Сонет 38
- Шекспир – Что, если бы я право заслужил – Сонет 125
- Шекспир – Бессмертную хоронят красоту – Сонет 83
- Шекспир – А это смерть – Сонет 64
- Шарль Бодлер – Жажда небытия
- Омар Хайям – О, не растите дерево печали
- Омар Хайям – О мудрец, если тот или этот дурак
- Омар Хайям о людях: Стихи, рубаи о человеке Омара Хайяма – Poetry Monster
- Омар Хайям – О, кумир, Дружбу ты почему прервала
- Омар Хайям – О горе, горе сердцу, где жгучей страсти нет
- Омар Хайям – О, если б, захватив с собой стихов диван
- Омар Хайям – О друге я мечтал, но им не стал никто
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.