Beneath this gloomy shade,
By Nature only for my sorrows made,
I’ll spend this voyce in crys,
In tears I’ll waste these eyes
By Love so vainly fed;
So Lust of old the Deluge punished.
Ah wretched youth! said I,
“Ah, wretched youth!” twice did I sadly cry:
“Ah, wretched youth!” the fields and floods reply.
When thoughts of Love I entertain,
I meet no words but “Never,” and “In vain.”
“Never” alas that dreadful name
Which fuels the infernal flame:
“Never,” My time to come must waste;
“In vain,” torments the present and the past.
“In vain, in vain!” said I;
“In vain, in vain!” twice did I sadly cry;
“In vain, in vain!” the fields and floods reply.
No more shall fields or floods do so;
For I to shades more dark and silent go:
All this world’s noise appears to me
A dull ill-acted comedy:
No comfort to my wounded sight,
In the suns busy and imperti’nent Light.
Then down I laid my head;
Down on cold earth; and for a while was dead,
And my freed soul to a strange somewhere fled.
“Ah, sottish Soul” said I,
When back to its cage again I saw it fly;
“Fool to resume her broken chain!
And row her galley here again!”
“Fool, to that body to return
Where it condemn’d and destin’d is to burn!
Once dead, how can it be,
Death should a thing so pleasant seem to thee,
That thou should’st come to live it o’re again in me?”
A few random poems:
- “`If you were mine, if you were mine” poem – Alfred Austin
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Предостережение
- The Only One I Can’t Live Without, Its You by Miraj Patel
- Владимир Высоцкий – Сыт я по горло, до подбородка
- Introduction to the Songs of Innocence by William Blake
- Those seven days by Vinaya Kumar Hanumanthappa
- A Grammarian’s Funeral by Robert Browning
- Lying Down by Robert Desnos
- Иван Крылов – Лиса-строитель (Басня)
- Roar Shack poem – Alice Fulton
- The First Chantey by Rudyard Kipling
- Эмиль Верхарн – Вперед
- Карина, ты моя любимая
- Владимир Маяковский – Перекопский энтузиазм
- Chosen by William Butler Yeats
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
- dance of life by Raj Arumugam
- Daddy, daddy, I can’t go to school by Raj Arumugam
- complete text of the discovery of Kama Sutra by Raj Arumugam
- come, sun rays by Raj Arumugam
- come on in, baby by Raj Arumugam
- Come home, sweetheart by Raj Arumugam
- Colbert Report: Australia by Raj Arumugam
- an evening’s music by Raj Arumugam
- ah poor moon by Raj Arumugam
- ah, happy crow by Raj Arumugam
- absent-mindedness; or I Dream of Spices by Raj Arumugam
- a walk in the forest by Raj Arumugam
- a maiden’s broken heart by Raj Arumugam
- a laugh song by Raj Arumugam
- a gentle day by Raj Arumugam
- a delicate beauty along the shore by Raj Arumugam
- Virtuous Love by Rajendra Ojha
- Tidy by Ralph Angel
- The Unsound Utterance by Raju Baruah
- The Storm by Rainbow Reed
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

Abraham Cowley (1618 – 1667), the Royalist Poet.Poet and essayist Abraham Cowley was born in London, England, in 1618. He displayed early talent as a poet, publishing his first collection of poetry, Poetical Blossoms (1633), at the age of 15. Cowley studied at Cambridge University but was stripped of his Cambridge fellowship during the English Civil War and expelled for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant of 1644. In turn, he accompanied Queen Henrietta Maria to France, where he spent 12 years in exile, serving as her secretary. During this time, Cowley completed The Mistress (1647). Arguably his most famous work, the collection exemplifies Cowley’s metaphysical style of love poetry. After the Restoration, Cowley returned to England, where he was reinstated as a Cambridge fellow and earned his MD before finally retiring to the English countryside. He is buried at Westminster Abbey alongside Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Cowley is a wonderful poet and an outstanding representative of the English baroque.