A poem by Alec Derwent-Hope (1907–2000)
by Alec Derwent Hope
What did I study in your School of Night?
When your mouth’s first unfathomable yes
Opened your body to be my book, I read
My answers there and learned the spell aright,
Yet, though I searched and searched, could never guess
What spirits it raised nor where their questions led.
Those others, familiar tenants of your sleep,
The whisperers, the grave somnambulists
Whose eyes turn in to scrutinize their woe,
The giant who broods above the nightmare steep,
That sleeping girl, shuddering, with clenched fists,
A vampire baby suckling at her toe,
They taught me most. The scholar held his pen
And watched his blood drip thickly on the page
To form a text in unknown characters
Which, as I scanned them, changed and changed again:
The lines grew bars, the bars a Delphic cage
And I the captive of his magic verse.

A few random poems:
- The house where I was born (07) by Yves Bonnefoy
- Sonnet 9: Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye by William Shakespeare
- In The Depths Of Solitude by Tupac Shakur
- Youth And Age by William Butler Yeats
- The Ever-Patient Woman poem – Andree Chedid poems | Poems and Poetry
- greek_light.html
- Олег Чупров – Он впадает в смятенье
- Man And Wife by Robert Lowell
- Вероника Тушнова – Ты не любишь считать облака
- Idyll by Siegfried Sassoon
- Fuzzy-Wuzzy by Rudyard Kipling
- Владислав Крапивин – Под ветрами нам плыть
- Николай Заболоцкий – Испытание воли
- Silence by Thomas Hood
- Владимир Маяковский – Было с белым много дел… (Главполитпросвет №44)
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
- Traveling Dream by Marge Piercy
- Toad Dreams by Marge Piercy
- To the Pay Toilet by Marge Piercy
- To Be of Use by Marge Piercy
- To a Steam Roller by Marianne Moore
- To an Intra-mural Rat by Marianne Moore
- The Woman in the Ordinary by Marge Piercy
- The Steeple-Jack by Marianne Moore
- The Seven Of Pentacles by Marge Piercy
- The Past is the Present by Marianne Moore
- The Paper Nautilus by Marianne Moore
- The Pangolin by Marianne Moore
- The Neighbor by Marge Piercy
- The Morning Half-Life Blues by Marge Piercy
- The Moment I knew my Life had Changed by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
- The Friend by Marge Piercy
- The Fish by Marianne Moore
- The Dark Cavalier by Margaret Widdemer
- The Colloquy Beneath by Margaret Marie Hubbard
- The Cat’s Song by Marge Piercy
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
Alec Derwent-Hope (1907–2000) was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.