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:
- For what’s worth breathing by Rixa White
- The Chambermaid’s Second Song by William Butler Yeats
- English Poetry. Percy Bysshe Shelley. Satan Broken Loose. Перси Биши Шелли. Тень Ада
- April 18 by Sylvia Plath
- Ольга Берггольц – Письмо из Ленинграда
- Beautiful Moroccan by Stanley Wilkin
- Николай Некрасов – Весна
- Ольга Берггольц – Я иду по местам боев
- Sonnet 51: Thus can my love excuse the slow offence by William Shakespeare
- Владимир Маяковский – Пустяк у Оки
- Владимир Маяковский – Дом Герцена
- To My Lord Fairfax poem – John Milton poems
- Sonnet 74: But be contented when that fell arrest by William Shakespeare
- For The Moment by Pierre Reverdy
- As With A Senryu S Hardening Ridge
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
- Николай Карамзин – Из письма к И. И. Дмитриеву (Что ж может быть любви и счастия быстрее)
- Николай Карамзин – Из мелодрамы Петр Великий (Жил был в свете добрый царь)
- Николай Карамзин – Истина
- Николай Карамзин – Impromptu графине Р, которой в одной святошной игре досталось быть королевою
- Николай Карамзин – Илья Муромец
- Николай Карамзин – Граф Гваринос
- Николай Карамзин – Господину Дмитриеву на болезнь его (Болезнь есть часть живущих в мире)
- Николай Карамзин – Гимн слепых
- Николай Карамзин – Гимн
- Николай Карамзин – Филлиде
- Николай Карамзин – Эпитафия (Он жил в сем мире для того)
- Николай Карамзин – Эпитафия Джону Гею
- Николай Карамзин – Эпиграмма (Я знаю, для чего Крадон)
- Николай Карамзин – Две песни
- Николай Карамзин – Дурной вкус
- Николай Карамзин – Делиины слова
- Николай Карамзин – Часто здесь в юдоли мрачной
- Николай Карамзин – Берег
- Николай Карамзин – Анакреонтические стихи А. А. Петрову
- Николай Карамзин – Алина
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.