A poem by Violet Nicolson, Lawrence Hope, Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (1865 – 1904)
They lay the slender body down
With all its wealth of wetted hair,
Only a daughter of the town,
But very young and slight and fair.
The eyes, whose light one cannot see,
Are sombre doubtless, like the tresses,
The mouth’s soft curvings seem to be
A roseate series of caresses.
And where the skin has all but dried
(The air is sultry in the room)
Upon her breast and either side,
It shows a soft and amber bloom.
By women here, who knew her life,
A leper husband, I am told,
Took all this loveliness to wife
When it was barely ten years old.
And when the child in shocked dismay
Fled from the hated husband’s care
He caught and tied her, so they say,
Down to his bedside by her hair.
To some low quarter of the town,
Escaped a second time, she flew;
Her beauty brought her great renown
And many lovers here she knew,
When, as the mystic Eastern night
With purple shadow filled the air,
Behind her window framed in light,
She sat with jasmin in her hair.
At last she loved a youth, who chose
To keep this wild flower for his own,
He in his garden set his rose
Where it might bloom for him alone.
Cholera came; her lover died,
Want drove her to the streets again,
And women found her there, who tried
To turn her beauty into gain.
But she who in those garden ways
Had learnt of Love, would now no more
Be bartered in the market place
For silver, as in days before.
That former life she strove to change;
She sold the silver off her arms,
While all the world grew cold and strange
To broken health and fading charms.
Till, finding lovers, but no friend,
Nor any place to rest or hide,
She grew despairing at the end,
Slipped softly down a well and died.
And yet, how short, when all is said,
This little life of love and tears!
Her age, they say, beside her bed,
To-day is only fifteen years.
A few random poems:
- The Children’s Song by Rudyard Kipling
- Олег Сердобольский – Футболист
- The Caged Skylark poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Владимир Маяковский – О том, как у Керзона с обедом разрасталась аппетитов зона
- Николай Языков – Землетрясенье
- Василий Жуковский – Мщение
- The Gardener LXXIX: I Often Wonder by Rabindranath Tagore
- Sonnet 28: How can I then return in happy plight by William Shakespeare
- Ad Piscatorem by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Альфред де Мюссе – Как лепестки весеннего цветка
- Sonnet 55: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments by William Shakespeare
- Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory by Robert Burns
- Николай Языков – А. Н. Вульфу (Теперь я в Камби, милый мой)
- Валерий Брюсов – Две вазы
- Hoffer by William Wordsworth
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
- A Wasted Illness by Thomas Hardy
- A Thunderstorm In Town by Thomas Hardy
- A Jog-Trot Pair by Thomas Hardy
- A Dream Or No by Thomas Hardy
- Ye Mariners of England by Thomas Campbell
- To the Evening Star by Thomas Campbell
- The Last Man by Thomas Campbell
- The Dirge of Wallace by Thomas Campbell
- The Battle of the Baltic by Thomas Campbell
- Song to the Evening Star by Thomas Campbell
- Ode to Winter by Thomas Campbell
- Ode to the Memory of Burns by Thomas Campbell
- Love And Madness by Thomas Campbell
- Lord Ullin’s Daughter by Thomas Campbell
- Hohenlinden by Thomas Campbell
- Gertrude of Wyoming by Thomas Campbell
- Freedom And Love by Thomas Campbell
- Benlomond by Thomas Campbell
- Adelgitha by Thomas Campbell
- The Resignation by Thomas Chatterton
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.