DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
Owl against Robin.
by Sidney Lanier

Frowning, the owl in the oak complained him
Sore, that the song of the robin restrained him
Wrongly of slumber, rudely of rest.
"From the north, from the east, from the south and the west,
Woodland, wheat-field, corn-field, clover,
Over and over and over and over,
Five o'clock, ten o'clock, twelve, or seven,
Nothing but robin-songs heard under heaven:
How can we sleep?
`Peep!' you whistle, and `cheep! cheep! cheep!'
Oh, peep, if you will, and buy, if 'tis cheap,
And have done; for an owl must sleep.
Are ye singing for fame, and who shall be first?
Each day's the same, yet the last is worst,
And the summer is cursed with the silly outburst
Of idiot red-breasts peeping and cheeping
By day, when all honest birds ought to be sleeping.
Lord, what a din! And so out of all reason.
Have ye not heard that each thing hath its season?
Night is to work in, night is for play-time;
Good heavens, not day-time!
A vulgar flaunt is the flaring day,
The impudent, hot, unsparing day,
That leaves not a stain nor a secret untold, -
Day the reporter, - the gossip of old, -
Deformity's tease, - man's common scold -
Poh! Shut the eyes, let the sense go numb
When day down the eastern way has come.
'Tis clear as the moon (by the argument drawn
From Design) that the world should retire at dawn.
Day kills. The leaf and the laborer breathe
Death in the sun, the cities seethe,
The mortal black marshes bubble with heat
And puff up pestilence; nothing is sweet
Has to do with the sun: even virtue will taint
(Philosophers say) and manhood grow faint
In the lands where the villainous sun has sway
Through the livelong drag of the dreadful day.
What Eden but noon-light stares it tame,
Shadowless, brazen, forsaken of shame?
For the sun tells lies on the landscape, - now
Reports me the `what', unrelieved with the `how', -
As messengers lie, with the facts alone,
Delivering the word and withholding the tone.
But oh, the sweetness, and oh, the light
Of the high-fastidious night!
Oh, to awake with the wise old stars -
The cultured, the careful, the Chesterfield stars,
That wink at the work-a-day fact of crime
And shine so rich through the ruins of time
That Baalbec is finer than London; oh,
To sit on the bough that zigzags low
By the woodland pool,
And loudly laugh at man, the fool
That vows to the vulgar sun; oh, rare,
To wheel from the wood to the window where
A day-worn sleeper is dreaming of care,
And perch on the sill and straightly stare
Through his visions; rare, to sail
Aslant with the hill and a-curve with the vale, -
To flit down the shadow-shot-with-gleam,
Betwixt hanging leaves and starlit stream,
Hither, thither, to and fro,
Silent, aimless, dayless, slow
(`Aimless? Field-mice?' True, they're slain,
But the night-philosophy hoots at pain,
Grips, eats quick, and drops the bones
In the water beneath the bough, nor moans
At the death life feeds on). Robin, pray
Come away, come away
To the cultus of night. Abandon the day.
Have more to think and have less to say.
And CANNOT you walk now? Bah! don't hop!
Stop!
Look at the owl, scarce seen, scarce heard,
O irritant, iterant, maddening bird!"
Baltimore, 1880.
Ballad Of A Bun, A
by Owen Seaman

(AFTER J. D.)
'I am sister to the mountains now,
And sister to the sun and moon.'
'Heed not belletrist jargon.'
JOHN DAVIDSON.
From Whitsuntide to Whitsuntide,
That is to say, all through the year,
Her patient pen was occupied
With songs and tales of pleasant cheer.
But still her talent went to waste
Like flotsam on an open sea;
She never hit the public taste,
Or knew the knack of Bellettrie.
Across the sounding City's fogs
There hurtled round her weary head
The thunder of the rolling logs;
"The Critics' Carnival!" she said.
Immortal prigs took heaven by storm,
Prigs scattered largesses of praise;
The work of both was rather warm;
"This is," she said, "the thing that pays!"
Sharp envy turned her wine to blood,
I mean it turned her blood to wine;
And this resolve came like a flood,
"The cake of knowledge must be mine!
"I am in Eve's predicament,
I sha'n't be happy till I've sinned;
Away!" She lightly rose, and sent
Her scruples sailing down the wind.
She did not tear her open breast,
Nor leave behind a track of gore,
But carried flannel next her chest,
And wore the boots she always wore.
Across the sounding City's din
She wandered, looking indiscreet,
And ultimately landed in
The neighbourhood of Regent Street.
She ran against a resolute
Policeman standing like a wall;
She kissed his feet and asked the route
To where they held the Carnival.
Her strange behaviour caused remark;
They said, "Her reason has been lost;"
Beside her eyes the gas was dark,
But that was owing to the frost.
A Decadent was dribbling by;
"Lady," he said, "you seem undone;
You need a panacea; try
This sample of the Bodley bun.
"It is fulfilled of precious spice,
Whereof I give the recipe;,
Take common dripping, stew in vice,
And serve with vertu; taste and see!
"And lo! I brand you on the brow
As kin to Nature's lowest germ;
You are sister to the microbe now,
And second-cousin to the worm."
He gave her of his golden store,
Such hunger hovered in her look;
She took the bun, and asked for more,
And went away and wrote a book.
To put the matter shortly, she
Became the topic of the town;
In all the lists of Bellettrie
Her name was regularly down.
"We recognise," the critics wrote,
"Maupassant's verve and Heine's wit;"
Some even made a verbal note
Of Shakespeare being out of it.
The seasons went and came again;
At length the languid Public cried:
"It is a sorry sort of Lane
That hardly ever turns aside.
"We want a little change of air;
On that," they said, "we must insist;
We cannot any longer bear
The seedy sex-impressionist."
Across the sounding City's din
This rumour smote her on the ear:
"The publishers are going in
For songs and tales of pleasant cheer!"
"Alack!" she said, "I lost the art,
And left my womanhood foredone,
When first I trafficked in the mart
All for a mess of Bodley bun.
"I cannot cut my kin at will,
Or jilt the protoplastic germ;
I am sister to the microbe still,
And second-cousin to the worm!"
The River Duddon - A Series Of Sonnets, 1820. - XV - From This Deep Chasm
by William Wordsworth

From this deep chasm, where quivering sunbeams play
Upon its loftiest crags, mine eyes behold
A gloomy Niche, capacious, blank, and cold;
A concave free from shrubs and mosses grey;
In semblance fresh, as if, with dire affray,
Some Statue, placed amid these regions old
For tutelary service, thence had rolled,
Startling the flight of timid Yesterday!
Was it by mortals sculptured? weary slaves
Of slow endeavour! or abruptly cast
Into rude shape by fire, with roaring blast
Tempestuously let loose from central caves?
Or fashioned by the turbulence of waves,
Then, when o'er highest hills the Deluge passed?
The Giant Puffball
by Edmund Charles Blunden

From what sad star I know not, but I found
Myself new-born below the coppice rail,
No bigger than the dewdrops and as round,
In a soft sward, no cattle might assail.
And so I gathered mightiness and grew
With this one dream kindling in me, that I
Should never cease from conquering light and dew
Till my white splendour touched the trembling sky.
A century of blue and stilly light
Bowed down before me, the dew came again,
The moon my sibyl worshipped through the night,
The sun returned and long abode; but then
Hoarse drooping darkness hung me with a shroud
And switched at me with shrivelled leaves in scorn.
Red morning stole beneath a grinning cloud,
And suddenly clambering over dike and thorn
A half-moon host of churls with flags and sticks
Hallooed and hurtled up the partridge brood,
And Death clapped hands from all the echoing thicks,
And trampling envy spied me where I stood;
Who haled me tired and quaking, hid me by,
And came again after an age of cold,
And hung me in the prison-house adry
From the great crossbeam. Here defiled and old
I perish through unnumbered hours, I swoon,
Hacked with harsh knives to staunch a child's torn hand;
And all my hopes must with my body soon
Be but as crouching dust and wind-blown sand.
Song. - Venus.
by Emma Lazarus

Frosty lies the winter-landscape,
In the twilight golden-green.
Down the Park's deserted alleys,
Naked elms stand stark and lean.
Dumb the murmur of the fountain,
Birds have flown from lawn and hill.
But while yonder star's ascendant,
Love triumphal reigneth still.
See the keen flame throb and tremble,
Brightening in the darkening night,
Breathing like a thing of passion,
In the sky's smooth chrysolite.
Not beneath the moon, oh lover,
Thou shalt gain thy heart's desire.
Speak to-night!    The gods are with thee
Burning with a kindred fire.
The Bleeding Hand; Or The Sprig Of Eglantine Given To A Maid
by Robert Herrick

From this bleeding hand of mine,
Take this sprig of Eglantine:
Which, though sweet unto your smell,
Yet the fretful briar will tell,
He who plucks the sweets, shall prove
Many thorns to be in love.
The Cockney Soul
by Henry Lawson

From Woolwich and Brentford and Stamford Hill, from Richmond into the Strand,
Oh, the Cockney soul is a silent soul, as it is in every land!
But out on the sand with a broken band it's sarcasm spurs them through;
And, with never a laugh, in a gale and a half, 'tis the Cockney cheers the crew.
Oh, send them a tune from the music-halls with a chorus to shake the sky!
Oh, give them a deep-sea chanty now, and a star to steer them by!
Now this is a song of the great untrained, a song of the Unprepared,
Who had never the brains to plead unfit, or think of the things they dared;
Of the grocer-souled and the draper-souled, and the clerks of the four o'clock,
Who stood for London and died for home in the nineteen-fourteen shock.
Oh, this is a pork-shop warrior's chant, come back from it, maimed and blind,
To a little old counter in Grey's Inn-road and a tiny parlour behind;
And the bedroom above, where the wife and he go silently mourning yet
For a son-in-law who shall never come back and a dead son's room "To Let".
(But they have a boy "in the fried-fish line" in a shop across the "wye",
Who will take them "aht" and "abaht" to-night and cheer their old eyes dry.)
And this is a song of the draper's clerk (what have you all to say?),
He'd a tall top-hat and a walking-coat in the city every day,
He wears no flesh on his broken bones that lie in the shell-churned loam;
For he went over the top and struck with his cheating yard-wand, home.
(Oh, touch your hat to the tailor-made before you are aware,
And lilt us a lay of Bank-holiday and the lights of Leicester-square!)
Hats off to the dowager lady at home in her house in Russell-square!
Like the pork-shop back and the Brixton flat, they are silently mourning there;
For one lay out ahead of the rest in the slush 'neath a darkening sky,
With the blood of a hundred earls congealed and his eye-glass to his eye.
(He gave me a cheque in an envelope on a distant gloomy day;
He gave me his hand at the mansion door and he said: "Good-luck! Good-bai!")
To Our Parents
by Pamela S. Vining, (J. C. Yule)

WRITTEN BY REQUEST, FOR A GOLDEN WEDDING
Full fifty years together - 
Father and mother dear - 
Through pleasant summer weather,
Or wintry tempests drear, - 
Thro' sunshine and thro' shadow,
Oft travel sore and tried,
Yet strong to aid each other,
You've journeyed side by side
A few brief years of climbing, - 
One glad, exultant glance
At the sun bright world around you,
At the smiling heaven's expanse, - 
And then, the slow descending
Into the vale below,
Where the light with shade is blending,
And the deamy waters flow
Full fifty years of travel - 
Then, on your worn staves rest,
And welcome home your children,
And many an honored guest, - 
We come to give you greeting, - 
We come to bring you cheer, - 
To hail with glad rejoicing
This fiftieth wedded year!
We know your hearts are asking
For one who is not here - 
Whose voice was sweetest music,
Whose smile was very dear,
But the blessed Heaven that holds him
Is very near to you,
And the warm love that enfolds him,
Enfolds his parents too.
Then let the tears we're shedding
Have naught of grief's alloy; - 
And let this GOLDEN WEDDING
Be one of tranquil joy.
God bless our honored father
God bless our mother dear!
And a thousand, thousand welcomes
To this fiftieth wedded year.
His Monument
by Helen Leah Reed

From top to pedestal you scan it lightly - 
Capped head to lettered base - and you are smiling.
What see you there to set your lips a-quiver?
An awkward figure cut from ugly granite,
Aye, roughly hewn, as if unhelped by chisel,
This peaceful man of war, sculptured grotesquely.
Still - there is metal in the gun he is holding,
And in the cannon balls piled up before him - 
The artist's symbols of a real soldier.
Yet jeer no longer!
Before you is a soldier of the Union,
Crowned with the tears and prayers of many mourners.
The Village set him here for all to honor,
Here, in the centre of their foot-worn common,
Where on long, summer evenings boys at baseball
May gaze and gaze, and make him an example;
A hero they would follow.
Beholding him I see no granite figure,
But face a man who fought to save his country,
Whose heart was pierced when wife, and child and mother
Clung to him closely in that tearful parting.
Yet brave he marched away while flags were fluttering,
Though in his soul he knew that never, never,
Might he again see those he loved so dearly,
Nor look again upon the old white steeple,
Upon the little streets and shabby buildings
Straggling unevenly toward the Common;
Or if he came back, he'd be maimed and battered,
Subject to hateful pity.
Therefore I smile not at the queer, gaunt figure,
The tilted cap - the wide and baggy trousers,
The long loose overcoat, the dangling knapsack,
This is the man who fought to save our country!
Who, in his millions, marched from every village,
From every city of our mighty Nation;
Who heard the drums and trumpets blithely playing - 
"Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching."
So there it stands - thank-offering of a people - 
Whether of rough-hewn stone, or bronze, or marble - 
Proving our debt to those who saved the Union,
Pointing the way for those who'd like to follow - 
Who to the death would fight were we in peril - 
The Soldier's Monument!
The Sprig Of Eglantine Given To A Maid
by Robert Herrick

From this bleeding hand of mine,
Take this sprig of Eglantine:
Which, though sweet unto your smell,
Yet the fretful briar will tell,
He who plucks the sweets, shall prove
Many thorns to be in love.
La Maison D'Or
by Oliver Wendell Holmes

(Bar Harbor)
From this fair home behold on either side
The restful mountains or the restless sea
So the warm sheltering walls of life divide
Time and its tides from still eternity.
Look on the waves: their stormy voices teach
That not on earth may toil and struggle cease.
Look on the mountains: better far than speech
Their silent promise of eternal peace.
Allurement.
by Margaret Steele Anderson

From yonder hedge, from yonder spray,
He calls me onward and away;
Broad lies the world and fair to see,
The cuckoo calls, is calling me!
I have not seen nor heard of Care,
Who used my very bed to share,
Since that first morn when, airily,
The cuckoo, calling, called to me!
My sweetheart's face? I have forgot;
My mother? But she calls me not;
From that green bank, from that dim lea,
The cuckoo calls, is calling me!
And I must go, I may not choose;
No gain there is, nor aught to lose;
And soon, ah, soon!, on some wild tree
The bird sits long and waits for me!
The Book
by John Greenleaf Whittier

Gallery of sacred pictures manifold,
A minster rich in holy effigies,
And bearing on entablature and frieze
The hieroglyphic oracles of old.
Along its transept aureoled martyrs sit;
And the low chancel side-lights half acquaint
The eye with shrines of prophet, bard, and saint,
Their age-dimmed tablets traced in doubtful writ!
But only when on form and word obscure
Falls from above the white supernal light
We read the mystic characters aright,
And life informs the silent portraiture,
Until we pause at last, awe-held, before
The One ineffable Face, love, wonder, and adore
Feuilles D'Automne
by Duncan Campbell Scott

Gather the leaves from the forest
And blow them over the world,
The wind of winter follows
The wind of autumn furled.
Only the beech tree cherishes
A leaf or two for ruth,
Their stems too tough for the tempest,
Like thoughts of love and of youth.
You may sit by the fire and ponder
While darkness veils the pane,
And fear that your memories are rushing away
In the wind and the rain.
But you'll find them in the quiet
When the clouds race with the moon,
Making the tender silver sound
Of a beech in the month of June.
For you cannot rob the memory
Of the leaves it loves the best;
The wind of time may harry them,
It rushes away with the rest.
The Green Above The Red.
by Thomas Osborne Davis

Air--Irish Molly O!
I.
Full often when our fathers saw the Red above the Green,
They rose in rude but fierce array, with sabre, pike and scian,
And over many a noble town, and many a field of dead,
They proudly set the Irish Green above the English Red.
II.
But in the end throughout the land, the shameful sight was seen--
The English Red in triumph high above the Irish Green;
But well they died in breach and field, who, as their spirits fled,
Still saw the Green maintain its place above the English Red.
III.
And they who saw, in after times, the Red above the Green
Were withered as the grass that dies beneath a forest screen;
Yet often by this healthy hope their sinking hearts were fed,
That, in some day to come, the Green should flutter o'er the Red.
IV.
Sure 'twas for this Lord Edward died, and Wolfe Tone sunk serene--
Because they could not bear to leave the Red above the Green;
And 'twas for this that Owen fought, and Sarsfield nobly bled--
Because their eyes were hot to see the Green above the Red.
V.
So when the strife began again, our darling Irish Green
Was down upon the earth, while high the English Red was seen;
Yet still we held our fearless course, for something in us said,
"Before the strife is o'er you'll see the Green above the Red."
VI.
And 'tis for this we think and toil, and knowledge strive to glean,
That we may pull the English Red below the Irish Green,
And leave our sons sweet Liberty, and smiling plenty spread
Above the land once dark with blood--the Green above the Red!
VII.
The jealous English tyrant now has banned the Irish Green,
And forced us to conceal it like a something foul and mean;
But yet, by Heavens! he'll sooner raise his victims from the dead
Than force our hearts to leave the Green, and cotton to the Red!
VIII.
We'll trust ourselves, for God is good, and blesses those who lean
On their brave hearts, and not upon an earthly king or queen;
And, freely as we lift our hands, we vow our blood to shed
Once and for evermore to raise the Green above the Red.
The Sonnets XXXIII - Full many a glorious morning have I seen
by William Shakespeare

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out! alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.
Ave
by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Prelude To "Illustrated Poems"
Full well I know the frozen hand has come
That smites the songs of grove and garden dumb,
And chills sad autumn's last chrysanthemum;
Yet would I find one blossom, if I might,
Ere the dark loom that weaves the robe of white
Hides all the wrecks of summer out of sight.
Sometimes in dim November's narrowing day,
When all the season's pride has passed away,
As mid the blackened stems and leaves we stray,
We spy in sheltered nook or rocky cleft
A starry disk the hurrying winds have left,
Of all its blooming sisterhood bereft.
Some pansy, with its wondering baby eyes
Poor wayside nursling! - fixed in blank surprise
At the rough welcome of unfriendly skies;
Or golden daisy, - will it dare disclaim
The lion's tooth, to wear this gentler name?
Or blood-red salvia, with its lips aflame.
The storms have stripped the lily and the rose,
Still on its cheek the flush of summer glows,
And all its heart-leaves kindle as it blows.
So had I looked some bud of song to find
The careless winds of autumn left behind,
With these of earlier seasons' growth to bind.
Ah me! my skies are dark with sudden grief,
A flower lies faded on my garnered sheaf;
Yet let the sunshine gild this virgin leaf,
The joyous, blessed sunshine of the past,
Still with me, though the heavens are overcast, - 
The light that shines while life and memory last.
Go, pictured rhymes, for loving readers meant;
Bring back the smiles your jocund morning lent,
And warm their hearts with sunbeams yet unspent!
Arms And The Man. - Prologue.
by James Barron Hope

Full-burnished through the long-revolving years
The ploughshare of a Century to-day
Runs peaceful furrows where a crop of Spears
Once stood in War's array.
And we, like those who on the Trojan plain
See hoary secrets wrenched from upturned sods; - 
Who, in their fancy, hear resound again
The battle-cry of gods; - 
We now, - this splendid scene before us spread
Where Freedom's full hexameter began - 
Restore our Epic, which the Nations read
As far its thunders ran.
Here visions throng on People and on Bard,
Ranks all a-glitter in battalions massed
And closed around as like a plum'd guard,
They lead us down the Past.
I see great Shapes in vague confusion march
Like giant shadows, moving vast and slow,
Beneath some torch-lit temple's mighty arch
Where long processions go.
I see these Shapes before me, all unfold,
But ne'er can fix them on the lofty wall,
Nor tell them, save as she of Endor told
What she beheld to Saul.
Cancelled Stanza.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Gather, O gather,
Foeman and friend in love and peace!
Waves sleep together
When the blasts that called them to battle, cease.
For fangless Power grown tame and mild
Is at play with Freedom's fearless child -
The dove and the serpent reconciled!
Full Of Life, Now
by Walt Whitman

Full of life, now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States,
To one a century hence, or any number of centuries hence,
To you, yet unborn, these, seeking you.
When you read these, I, that was visible, am become invisible;
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me;
Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with you, and become your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)
The Lass Of Ecclefechan.
by Robert Burns

Tune - "Jacky Latin."
I.
Gat ye me, O gat ye me,
O gat ye me wi' naething?
Rock and reel, and spinnin' wheel,
A mickle quarter basin.
Bye attour, my gutcher has
A hich house and a laigh ane,
A' for bye, my bonnie sel',
The toss of Ecclefechan.
II.
O haud your tongue now, Luckie Laing,
O hand your tongue and jauner;
I held the gate till you I met,
Syne I began to wander:
I tint my whistle and my sang,
I tint my peace and pleasure:
But your green graff, now, Luckie Laing,
Wad airt me to my treasure.