A poem by Violet Nicolson, Lawrence Hope, Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (1865 – 1904)
Dost thou hear the tom-toms throbbing,
Like a lonely lover sobbing
For the beauty that is robbing him of all his life’s delight?
Plaintive sounds, restrained, enthralling,
Seeking through the twilight falling
Something lost beyond recalling, in the darkness of the night.
Oh, my little, loved Firoza,
Come and nestle to me closer,
Where the golden-balled Mimosa makes a canopy above,
For the day, so hot and burning,
Dies away, and night, returning,
Sets thy lover’s spirit yearning for thy beauty and thy love.
Soon will come the rosy warning
Of the bright relentless morning,
When, thy soft caresses scorning, I shall leave thee in the shade.
All the day my work must chain me,
And its weary bonds restrain me,
For I may not re-attain thee till the light begins to fade.
But at length the long day endeth,
As the cool of night descendeth
His last strength thy lover spendeth in returning to thy breast,
Where beneath the Babul nightly,
While the planets shimmer whitely,
And the fire-flies glimmer brightly, thou shalt give him love and rest.
Far away, across the distance,
The quick-throbbing drums’ persistence
Shall resound, with soft insistence, in the pauses of delight,
Through the sequence of the hours,
While the starlight and the flowers
Consecrate this love of ours, in the Temple of the Night.
A few random poems:
- Robert Burns: Sketch -New Year’s Day [1790]: To Mrs. Dunlop.
- Our Abode In Arby Wood by William Barnes
- Virtuous Love by Rajendra Ojha
- I Know From my Bed by Michael Lee Johnson
- Василий Лебедев-Кумач – В метро
- Валерий Брюсов – Гимн Атону
- Out of Your Love by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- Scorn Not The Sonnet by William Wordsworth
- That Shadow, my Likeness. by Walt Whitman
- Sonnet V by Mahmoud Darwish
- My Words Embrace by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Вера Полозкова – И пока он вскакивает с кровати
- After Long Silence by William Butler Yeats
- Noon by Philip Levine
- Epitaph On A Free But Tame Redbreast, A Favourite Of Miss Sally Hurdis by William Cowper
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
- To A Little Girl That Has Told A Lie
- Guillaume de Lorris Belated: A Vision of Italy by Ezra Pound
- An Ode to the Democratic Rat
- Sonnet, an encyclopedic definition
- To A Feminist
- 对于女权主义者
- To the Rat’s Pencil
- 致老鼠的铅笔
- Toward Salvation
- My rat
- I Love My Rat
- 我爱我的老鼠
- Афанасий Фет – Сад весь в цвету
- Impostor’s Coronation
- Monster’s Cave
- 白色四月
- White April
- 我被包围了
- Surrounded
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.