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:
- Sea Dreams poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- The Lady of Shalott | Best Love Poems
- Splenda by Rob Leatherman Sr.
- Winter by Shaunna Harper
- Kinu Goala’s Alley – English Translation by Rabindranath Tagore
- Эмиль Верхарн – Восстание
- Robert Burns: Address Of Beelzebub: To the Right Honourable the Earl of Breadalbane, President of the Right Honourable and Honourable the Highland Society, which met on the 23rd of May last at the Shakespeare, Covent Garden, to concert ways and means to frustrate the designs of five hundred Highlanders, who, as the Society were informed by Mr. M’Kenzie of Applecross, were so audacious as to attempt an escape from their lawful lords and masters whose property they were, by emigrating from the lands of Mr. Macdonald of Glengary to the wilds of Canada, in search of that fantastic thing-Liberty.
- The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje
- Levitation
- Lohengrin poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- Robert Burns: On The Seas And Far Away:
- Николай Гумилев – Моя мечта летит к далекому Парижу
- The Song of the Sons by Rudyard Kipling
- Yarrow Revisited by William Wordsworth
- Владимир Набоков – Большая медведица
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
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Ночной пилигрим
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Ночная песня
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Не называй далекой бездной
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Не касайся моих чертежей
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Нарядно выстлав дол, взбегая на холмы
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – На улице
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – На поле Ватерло
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – На берегу
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Море и капля
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Молкнущий вечер во мгле
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Молись в ночи без плача о заре
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Мой сад
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Метель
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Элегия (Мысль в разлуке с вещим сном)
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Цветок
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Чудом тени
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Черное озеро
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Чем больше в мире я живу
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Час обыкновенный
- Юрий Кузнецов – Простота милосердия
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.