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:
- Good-by and Keep Cold by Robert Frost
- Валерий Брюсов – К портрету К.Д. Бальмонта
- Edmonton, thy cemetery by Stevie Smith
- Ольга Седакова – С нежностью и глубиной
- Bob The Fiddler by William Barnes
- Sonnet 48: How careful was I, when I took my way by William Shakespeare
- The English Flag by Rudyard Kipling
- Late Moon by Philip Levine
- “Goldie Pinklesweet…” by Roald Dahl
- Smiling Buddha by Satish Verma
- Валерий Брюсов – Идеал
- Inscriptions Written with a Slate Pencil upon a Stone by William Wordsworth
- Depths
- The Meaning of Music by Mercedes Madrigal
- To Lily poem – Alexander Pushkin
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
- Autumn Leaves by Thomas J Camp
- You by Thonda Sri Indrani
- You Will Forget! by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- Written at Stonehenge by Thomas Warton
- Words Of Love Forevermore by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- Why? by Tiffany Ann Monroe
- While Summer Suns O’er the Gay Prospect Play’d by Thomas Warton
- What Is Woman But A Song! by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- We are Africa by Timileyin Gabriel Olajuwon
- Virgule by Thomas Lux
- Verses on Sir Joshua Reynold’s Painted Window at New College, Oxford by Thomas Warton
- Vagueness Petrified by Thonda Sri Indrani
- Unlike, For Example, The Sound Of A Riptooth Saw by Thomas Lux
- Town Planning Agencies by Tilottama Chatterjee
- Torn Shades by Thomas Lux
- The Road That Runs Beside The River by Thomas Lux
- The Pulling Away by Timothy Cole
- The Pleasures of Melancholy by Thomas Warton
- The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball by Thomas Lux
- The Mocking Bird by Timothy Thomas Fortune
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.