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:
- Hymn To Adversity by Thomas Gray
- The Mothering Blackness by Maya Angelou
- If I could tell you by W. H. Auden
- Conversation Among The Ruins by Sylvia Plath
- To Eva Descending The Stair by Sylvia Plath
- A Love Song from the North by Sarojini Naidu
- Baldovan by William Topaz McGonagall
- It’s Beautiful to See Through the Eyes of the Sky by Walter William Safar
- softly… in wingless dream by Steve Troyanovich
- Sonnet XV. On The Grasshopper And Cricket poem – John Keats poems
- Obligation poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Жан де Лафонтен – Карман
- To A Young Friend, On His Arriving At Cambridge Wet, When No Rain Had Fallen There by William Cowper
- Grace Before Song poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Владимир Набоков – Встреча
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
- Consider This And In Our Time by W H Auden
- The Common Life by W H Auden
- Cocaine Lil and Morphine Sue by W H Auden
- Christmas Oratio by W H Auden
- Carry Her Over the Water by W H Auden
- Canzone by W H Auden
- Calypso by W H Auden
- Base Words Are Uttered by W H Auden
- Autumn Song by W H Auden
- August 1968 by W H Auden
- Atlantis by W H Auden
- As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden
- As We Like It by W H Auden
- As the poets have mournfully sung by W H Auden
- Are You There? by W H Auden
- After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics by W. H. Auden
- Academic Graffiti by W H Auden
- A Walk After Dark by W H Auden
- A New Year Greeting by W H Auden
- Continual Conversation With A Silent Man by Wallace Stevens
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.