A poem by Alexander Block – Alexandre Block – Alexandr Blok – Александр Блок
(1880-1921)
We waited commonly for sleep or even death.
The instances were wearisome as ages.
But suddenly the wind’s refreshing breath
Touched through the window the Holy Bible’s pages:
An old man goes there; who’s now all white-haired;
With rapid steps and merry eyes, alone,
He smiles to us, and often calls with hand,
And leaves us with a gait, that is well-known.
And suddenly we all, who watched the old man’s track,
Well recognized just him who now lay before us,
And turning in a sudden rapture back,
Beheld a corpse with eyes forever closed …
And it was good for us the soul’s way to trace,
And, in the leaving one, to find the glee it’s forming.
The time had come. Recall and love in grace,
And celebrate another house-warming!
A few random poems:
- Алексей Толстой – Ты любишь в нем лишь первую любовь
- The Mocking Bird by Timothy Thomas Fortune
- A Slice Of School by Vaishnavi Prakash
- Shaftesbury Feäir by William Barnes
- Владимир Луговской – Конек-горбунок
- Ольга Седакова – Играющий ребенок
- The Song of the Dead by Rudyard Kipling
- Владимир Костров – Я стою, как дерево в лесу
- Robert Burns: Elegy On The Year 1788:
- And their feet move by Sappho
- Creative Self Sabotage – 5 Favourite Sabotage Techniques Of Creative Artists & How To Avoid Them
- Wings
- Years of the Modern. by Walt Whitman
- ‘In the Pink’ by Siegfried Sassoon
- Жан де Лафонтен – Ласочка в амбаре
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
- Written In A Volume Of The Comtesse De Noailles
- Kyrenaikos
- With A Copy Of Shakespeares Sonnets On Leaving College
- Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty
- Vivien
- I Loved
- Virginibus Puerisque
- I Have A Rendezvous With Death
- Translations Dante Inferno Canto Xxvi
- Fragments
- To England At The Outbreak Of The Balkan War
- Eudaemon
- Tithonus
- The Wanderer
- The Torture Of Cuauhtemoc
- The Sultans Palace
- The Rendezvous
- The Old Lowe House Staten Island
- The Nympholept
- The Need To Love
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

Alexander Blok (1880-1921), also Block, was a Russian poet, writer, publicist, playwright, translator and literary critic. A classic of Russian literature.