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:
- Scribbles by Suchi Gaur
- Old Times by Rixa white
- The Songs of the Lathes by Rudyard Kipling
- Gethsemane by Rudyard Kipling
- Au Salon
- Ольга Берггольц – Память (Всей земною горечью и болью)
- Dead Men’s Love by Rupert Brooke
- William Gilmore Simms – William Gilmore Simms
- Visiting a Dead Man on a Summer Day by Marge Piercy
- The Woman In The Rye by Thomas Hardy
- Hughley Steeple poem – A. E. Housman
- Нина Воронель – Поэты военных лет
- Fairy Tale by Robert Desnos
- His Mercy Endureth For Ever by John Oxenham
- Олег Григорьев – Приехала жена из Сочи
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
- A Drinking Song by William Butler Yeats
- A Dream Of Death by William Butler Yeats
- A Dialogue Of Self And Soul by William Butler Yeats
- A Deep Sworn Vow by William Butler Yeats
- A Crazed Girl by William Butler Yeats
- A Cradle Song by William Butler Yeats
- A Coat by William Butler Yeats
- A Bronze Head by William Butler Yeats
- He Reproves The Curlew by William Butler Yeats
- He Remembers Forgotten Beauty by William Butler Yeats
- He Hears The Cry Of The Sedge by William Butler Yeats
- He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes by William Butler Yeats
- He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace by William Butler Yeats
- Gratitude To The Unknown Instructors by William Butler Yeats
- Girl’s Song by William Butler Yeats
- From The ‘Antigone’ by William Butler Yeats
- Fragments by William Butler Yeats
- For Anne Gregory by William Butler Yeats
- Fergus And The Druid by William Butler Yeats
- Father And Child by William Butler Yeats
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.