A poem by Alistar Crowley (1875-1947)
I
How should I seek to make a song for thee
When all my music is to moan thy name?
That long sad monotone; the same; the same –
Matching the mute insatiable sea
That throbs with life’s bewitching agony,
Too long to measure and too fierce to tame!
An hurtful joy, a fascinating shame
Is this great ache that grips the heart of me.
Even as a cancer, so this passion gnaws
Away my soul, and will not ease its jaws
Till I am dead. Then let me die! Who knows
But that this corpse committed to the earth
May be the occasion of some happier birth?
Spring’s earliest snowdrop? Summer’s latest rose?
II
Thou knowest what asp hath fixed its lethal tooth
In the white breast that trembled like a flower
At thy name whispered. thou hast marked how hour
By hour its poison hath dissolved my youth,
Half skilled to agonise, half skilled to soothe
This passion ineluctable, this power
Slave to its single end, to storm the tower
That holdeth thee, who art Authentic Truth.
O golden hawk! O lidless eye! Behold
How the grey creeps upon the shuddering gold!
Still I will strive! That thou mayst sweep
Swift on the dead from thine all-seeing steep –
And the unutterable word by spoken.
A few random poems:
- In a Disused Graveyard by Robert Frost
- Coromandel Fishers by Sarojini Naidu
- Instead of farewell by Vinko Kalinić
- Epitaph on John Rankine by Robert Burns
- Reasons to Survive November by Tony Hoagland
- I Sing the Body Electric. by Walt Whitman
- Robert Burns: The Winter Of Life:
- Mending Socks by Martin Willitts Jr.
- Владимир Маяковский – Селькор
- They Would Love To See Me Dead by Mahmoud Darwish
- Sonnet 113: Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind by William Shakespeare
- The Dead King by Rudyard Kipling
- What the Ghost of the Gambler Said by Vachel Lindsay
- Think of the Soul. by Walt Whitman
- The house where I was born (01) by Yves Bonnefoy
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
- tears.html
- simple_heart.html
- silence.html
- she.html
- sealed_appropriate.html
- seal.html
- sea_salt_a_villanelle.html
- salamis_quot.html
- sacrifice_and_love.html
- poetry_and_politics.html
- plato.html
- paralipomemnon.html
- our_refuge.html
- one_sweet_white_light.html
- new_land.html
- motionless_body.html
- mother.html
- minimalism_and_the_elm_choka.html
- mark.html
- love_flower.html
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
