A poem by Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)
Darkness had stretched its colour,
Deep blue across the pane:
No cloud to make night duller,
No moon with its tarnish stain;
But only here and there a star,
One sharp point of frosty fire,
Hanging infinitely far
In mockery of our life and death
And all our small desire.
Now in this hour of waking
From under brows of stone,
A new pale day is breaking
And the deep night is gone.
Sordid now, and mean and small
The daylight world is seen again,
With only the veils of mist that fall
Deaf and muffling over all
To hide its ugliness and pain.
But to-day this dawn of meanness
Shines in my eyes, as when
The new world’s brightness and cleanness
Broke on the first of men.
For the light that shows the huddled things
Of this close-pressing earth,
Shines also on your face and brings
All its dear beauty back to me
In a new miracle of birth.
I see you asleep and unpassioned,
White-faced in the dusk of your hair–
Your beauty so fleetingly fashioned
That it filled me once with despair
To look on its exquisite transience
And think that our love and thought and laughter
Puff out with the death of our flickering sense,
While we pass ever on and away
Towards some blank hereafter.
But now I am happy, knowing
That swift time is our friend,
And that our love’s passionate glowing,
Though it turn ash in the end,
Is a rose of fire that must blossom its way
Through temporal stuff, nor else could be
More than a nothing. Into day
The boundless spaces of night contract
And in your opening eyes I see
Night born in day, in time eternity.
A few random poems:
- Sonnet IX. Keen, Fitful Gusts Are poem – John Keats poems
- Lord when the wise men came from farr by Sidney Godolphin
- Стефан Малларме – Ее ногтей ожив, что ожил из пароса
- Joy In Martyrdom by William Cowper
- Ярослав Смеляков – Стихи, написанные в псковской гостинице
- Ольга Берггольц – Мне не поведать о моей утрате
- Passion Of My Heart by Stevens Cadet
- Вера Павлова – Сражаться с прошлым
- Friday’s Child by W H Auden
- Life, wait for me by Martin Zakovski
- Николай Гумилев – Заводи
- Михаил Лермонтов – Вечер после дождя
- What would I do without this world by Samuel Beckett
- Od’d(ode) to Whitey Bulger by Susan King Saunders
- Singapore by Mary Gilmore
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
- Chronicle
- Change
- Beauty
- Bathing River
- Bathing In The River
- Answer Copy Verses Sent Me Jersey
- Anacreontics The Swallow
- Anacreontics The Epicure
- Anacreontics Drinking
- An Answer To A Copy Of Verses Sent Me To Jersey
- Against Hope
- Against Fruition
- Summer Moon
- Stars
- Love Is Just Like The Rain
- Boy Running In The Rain
- Xai Kou From Book Seeds Of Faith
- Xai Kou1
- Xai Kou0
- Xai Kou
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
Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894 – 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.