Go, let the fatted calf be kill’d;
My prodigal’s come home at last,
With noble resolutions fill’d,
And fill’d with sorrow for the past:
No more will burn with love or wine;
But quite has left his women and his swine.
Welcome, ah! welcome, my poor heart!
Welcome! I little thought, I’ll swear
(‘T is now so long since we did part),
Ever again to see thee here:
Dear wanderer! Since from me you fled,
How often have I heard that thou wert dead!
Hast thou not found each woman’s breast
(The lands where thou hast travelled)
Either by savages possest,
Or wild and uninhabited?
What joy couldst take, or what repose,
In countries so unciviliz’d as those?
Lust, the scorching dog-star, here
Rages with immoderate heat;
Whilst pride, the rugged Northern bear,
In others makes the cold too great:
And, where these are temperate known,
The soil’s all barren sand or rocky stone.
When once or twice you chanc’d to view
A rich, well-govern’d heart,
Like China, it admitted you
But to the frontier-part.
From Paradise shut for evermore,
What good is ‘t that an angel kept the door?
Well fare the pride, and the disdain,
And vanities, with beauty join’d;
I ne’er had seen this heart again,
If any fair-one had been kind:
My dove, but once let loose, I doubt
Would ne’er return, had not the flood been out.
A few random poems:
- The Song of the Old Guard by Rudyard Kipling
- Омар Хайям – Друзей поменьше
- If By Chance Your Eye Offend You poem – A. E. Housman
- Ольга Седакова – Московские картинки
- The Lighted Window by Sara Teasdale
- Untitled XXVI by Yunus Emre
- Sonnet 22 poem – John Milton poems
- Ярослав Смеляков – Я отюдова уйду
- A Saturday Sunrise by Philo Ikonya
- Юлиан Анисимов – Камнем сгрудилась комната
- Николай Языков – Дом сумасшедших в Дерпте
- Late Light by Philip Levine
- The Rear-Guard by Siegfried Sassoon
- Home Sick
- The Worlds Greatest Smoke Off by Shel Silverstein
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
- Never Sure Which You Are by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Important thing’s in life by Martin Smith
- Nestling by Mark R Slaughter
- Images by Mary Etta Metcalf
- My Words Embrace by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Illusions by Mark R Slaughter
- My Mother On An Evening In Late Summer by Mark Strand
- If Only by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Morning by Mark R Slaughter
- I, or Someone Like Me by Marvin Bell
- Mending Socks by Martin Willitts Jr.
- He Said To by Marvin Bell
- Grumpy Old Man by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Manure by Mark R Slaughter
- Giving Myself Up by Mark Strand
- Mammary Tunes by Mark R Slaughter
- Ghosts by Martina Reisz Newberry
- Lines For Winter by Mark Strand
- From The Long Sad Party by Mark Strand
- Life, wait for me by Martin Zakovski
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.