A poem by Violet Nicolson, Lawrence Hope, Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (1865 – 1904)
He loved the Plant with a keen delight,
A passionate fervour, strange to see,
Tended it ardently, day and night,
Yet never a flower lit up the tree.
The leaves were succulent, thick, and green,
And, sessile, out of the snakelike stem
Rose spine-like fingers, alert and keen,
To catch at aught that molested them.
But though they nurtured it day and night,
With love and labour, the child and he
Were never granted the longed-for sight
Of a flower crowning the twisted tree.
Until one evening a wayworn Priest
Stopped for the night in the Temple shade
And shared the fare of their simple feast
Under the vines and the jasmin laid.
He, later, wandering round the flowers
Paused awhile by the blossomless tree.
The man said, “May it be fault of ours,
That never its buds my eyes may see?
“Aslip it came from the further East
Many a sunlit summer ago.”
“It grows in our Jungles,” said the Priest,
“Men see it rarely; but this I know,
“The Jungle people worship it; say
They bury a child around its roots–
Bury it living:–the only way
To crimson glory of flowers and fruits.”
He spoke in whispers; his furtive glance
Probing the depths of the garden shade.
The man came closer, with eyes askance,
The child beside them shivered, afraid.
A cold wind drifted about the three,
Jarring the spines with a hungry sound,
The spines that grew on the snakelike tree
And guarded its roots beneath the ground.
. . . . . .
After the fall of the summer rain
The plant was glorious, redly gay,
Blood-red with blossom. Never again
Men saw the child in the Temple play.
A few random poems:
- Ольга Берггольц – Бабье лето (надо любить, жалеть, прощать)
- Mother o’ Mine by Rudyard Kipling
- Robert Burns: O Lay Thy Loof In Mine, Lass:
- ode to love by Rohit Sridharan
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Мой сад
- Rendezvous
- Sonnet: To Time by Sylvia Plath
- Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? by William Shakespeare
- Яков Полонский – Откуда
- The River by Mark Olynyk
- A Mathematical Problem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- In The Stilness O’ The Night by William Barnes
- Swift’s Epitaph by William Butler Yeats
- 11 Amazing Autistic Famous People
- Astrophel And Stella-First Song by Sir Philip Sidney
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
- Wind on the Hill by AA Milne
- us_two_by_a_a_milne.html
- twinkletoes.html
- the_morning_walk.html
- the_kings_breakfast.html
- the_dormouse_and_the_doctor.html
- the_christening.html
- rice_pudding.html
- politeness.html
- missing.html
- market_square.html
- lines_and_squares.html
- if_i_were_king.html
- hoppity.html
- happiness.html
- come_out_with_me.html
- buckingham_palace.html
- brownie.html
- at_the_zoo.html
- Water Strider by Aaron Baker
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
Violet Nicolson ( 1865 – 1904); otherwise known as Adela Florence Nicolson (née Cory), was an English poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of Laurence Hope, however she became known as Violet Nicolson. In the early 1900s, she became a best-selling author. She committed suicide and is buried in Madras, now Chennai, India.