A poem by Alan Seeger (1888-1916)
The need to love that all the stars obey
Entered my heart and banished all beside.
Bare were the gardens where I used to stray;
Faded the flowers that one time satisfied.
Before the beauty of the west on fire,
The moonlit hills from cloister-casements viewed
Cloud-like arose the image of desire,
And cast out peace and maddened solitude.
I sought the City and the hopes it held:
With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled,
As the thick roofs and walls close-paralleled
Shut out the fair horizons of the world—
A truant from the fields and rustic joy,
In my changed thought that image even so
Shut out the gods I worshipped as a boy
And all the pure delights I used to know.
Often the veil has trembled at some tide
Of lovely reminiscence and revealed
How much of beauty Nature holds beside
Sweet lips that sacrifice and arms that yield:
Clouds, window-framed, beyond the huddled eaves
When summer cumulates their golden chains,
Or from the parks the smell of burning leaves,
Fragrant of childhood in the country lanes,
An organ-grinder’s melancholy tune
In rainy streets, or from an attic sill
The blue skies of a windy afternoon
Where our kites climbed once from some grassy hill:
And my soul once more would be wrapped entire
In the pure peace and blessing of those years.
Before the fierce infection of Desire
Had ravaged all the flesh. Through starting tears
Shone that lost Paradise; but, if it did,
Again ere long the prison-shades would fall
That Youth condemns itself to walk amid,
So narrow, but so beautiful withal.
And I have followed Fame with less devotion,
And kept no real ambition but to see
Rise from the foam of Nature’s sunlit ocean
My dream of palpable divinity;
And aught the world contends for to mine eye
Seemed not so real a meaning of success
As only once to clasp before I die
My vision of embodied happiness.
A few random poems:
- Владимир Маяковский – Обряды кому и на кой ляд целовальный обряд
- Under Cover of Night by Robert Desnos
- Джон Китс – Четыре разных времени в году
- black_on_black.html
- twinkletoes.html
- Angel Of Better Days To Come
- Il Penseroso poem – John Milton poems
- Виталий Сивяков – Крещенье
- To Songs At the Marriage Of The Lord Fauconberg And The Lady Mary Cromwell poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- In Memory Of My Mother by Patrick Kavanagh
- The Silent Lover i by Sir Walter Raleigh
- A prayer to the Wind by Thomas Carew
- Robert Burns: The Whistle -A Ballad:
- I Hardly Remember by Rafael Guillen
- The Song of the Old Guard by Rudyard Kipling
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
- Wild Dark Love Song by Sharmagne Leland-St. John
- Evolution by Sharmagne Leland-St. John
- There Were Dry Red Days by Sharmagne Leland-St. John
- I Said Coffee by Sharmagne Leland-St. John
- Peaceful Battles by Shekhar Srinivasan
- Passed Away Pain by Shalini Samuel
- Pain Became My Friend Today © by Shannen Wrass
- Open sky by Shailendra Chauhan
- On the edge of time by Shailendra Chauhan
- Life-companion by Shailendra Chauhan
- Joker of the Pack by Shekhar Srinivasan
- Its gonna be sunday by Shailendra Singh
- In her reach by Shailendra Chauhan
- Human Spirit by Shawn Ervin
- Emotions in exile by Shailendra Chauhan
- Desire for You by Seema Gupta
- Brother by Shashini Fernanadez
- At The Gate Of A Hospital by Shahida Latif
- Apathy by Shailendra Chauhan
- Agonizing picture of human existence(Rural Life) by Seema Gupta
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
Alan Seeger (1888-1916) was an American war poet who fought and died in World War I during the Battle of the Somme, serving in the French Foreign Legion. Seeger was the brother of Charles Seeger, a noted American pacifist and musicologist and the uncle of folk musician, Pete Seeger.