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:
- Федор Сологуб – Ах, лягушки по дорожке
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песня автомобилиста
- Stream And Sun At Glendalough by William Butler Yeats
- Orlando Furioso Canto 19 by Ludovico Ariosto
- Омар Хайям – Благородные люди, друг друга любя
- Here’s to the Mice! by Vachel Lindsay
- Orlando Furioso Canto 23 by Ludovico Ariosto
- Indian Summer by William Ellery Leonard
- A Library Of Skulls by Thomas Lux
- A Heart Divided by Pierre Reverdy
- Forbidden Fruit by Mukeshkumar Raval
- The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water by William Butler Yeats
- Нина Воронель – Дан приказ
- Ольга Берггольц – Мой дом
- Neglecting the Word of God: A Foundational Cause of Lukewarmness
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
- The Hosts
- The Deserted Garden
- The Bayadere
- The Aisne
- Tezcotzinco
- Sonnet Xvi Who Shall Invoke Her
- Sonnet Xv
- Sonnet Xiv
- Sonnet Xiii
- Sonnet Xii
- Sonnet Xi
- Sonnet X
- Sonnet Viii
- Sonnet Vii
- Sonnet Vi
- Sonnet V
- Sonnet Ix
- Sonnet Iv
- Sonnet Iii
- Sonnet Ii
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.