DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
The Comforters
by Rudyard Kipling

Until thy feet have trod the Road
Advise not wayside folk,
Nor till thy back has borne the Load
Break in upon the broke.
Chase not with undesired largesse
Of sympathy the heart
Which, knowing her own bitterness,
Presumes to dwell apart.
Employ not that glad hand to raise
The God-forgotten head
To Heaven and all the neighbours' gaze,
Cover thy mouth instead.
The quivering chin, the bitten lip,
The cold and sweating brow,
Later may yearn for fellowship,
Not now, you ass, not now!
Time, not thy ne'er so timely speech,
Life, not thy views thereon,
Shall furnish or deny to each
His consolation.
Or, if impelled to interfere,
Exhort, uplift, advise,
Lend not a base, betraying ear
To all the victim's cries.
Only the Lord can understand,
When those first pangs begin,
How much is reflex action and
How much is really sin.
E'en from good words thyself refrain,
And tremblingly admit
There is no anodyne for pain
Except the shock of it.
So, when thine own dark hour shall fall,
Unchallenged canst thou say:
"I never worried you at all,
For God's sake go away!"
Kim
by Rudyard Kipling

Unto whose use the pregnant suns are poised,
With idiot moons and stars retracting stars?
Creep thou between, thy coming's all unnoised.
Heaven hath her high, as Earth her baser, wars.
Heir to these tumults, this affright, that fray
(By Adam's, fathers', own, sin bound alway);
Peer up, draw out thy horoscope and say
Which planet mends thy threadbare fate, or mars.
My Heaven
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Unhoused in deserts of accepted thought,
And lost in jungles of confusing creeds,
My soul strayed, homeless, finding its own needs
Unsatisfied with what tradition taught.
The pros and cons, the little ifs and ands,
The but and maybe, and the this and that,
On which the churches thicken and grow fat,
I found but structures built on shifting sands.
And all their heavens were strange and far away,
And all their hells were made of human hate;
And since for death I did not care to wait,
A heaven I fashioned for myself one day.
Of happy thoughts I built it stone by stone,
With joy of life I draped each spacious room,
With love's great light I drove away all gloom,
And in the centre I made God a throne.
And this dear heaven I set within my heart,
And carried it about with me alway,
And then the changing dogmas of the day
Seemed alien to my thoughts and held no part.
Now as I take my heaven from place to place
I find new rooms by love's revealing light,
And death will give me but a larger sight
To see my palace spreading into space.
Comments
by Paul Cameron Brown

... Unrestrained, imaginative writing.
Brown's magic is the vibrating universe,
his sympathy is his ability to receive these
vibrations. Sympathetic Magic captures
the movement of life in its intervals - 
his poems resemble stopped action photographs from a film.
THE TORONTO STAR
... The poetry is fine ...    rewarding reading ...
Almost every poem in Sympathetic Magic boasts
an admirable image or two. Brown can write,
without a doubt.
POETRY CANADA POESIE
... Wry humour.
The poet revels in image and can use it well.
Paul Cameron Brown is capable of interesting,
even arresting work.
CANADIAN BOOK REVIEW ANNUAL 1985
Le voyage exotique devient parfois fantistique ...
Se plonger dans les pages de "Sympathetic Magic",
c'est partir pour un autre monde o' Paul Cameron Brown
envoute par les mots et les images.
DIPLOMATIC OBSERVER
The Nameless Graves
by William Arthur Dunkerley (John Oxenham)

Unnamed at times, at times unknown,
Our graves lie thick beyond the seas;
Unnamed, but not of Him unknown;--
He knows!--He sees!
And not one soul has fallen in vain.
Here was no useless sacrifice.
From this red sowing of white seed
New life shall rise.
All that for which they fought lives on,
And flourishes triumphantly;
Watered with blood and hopeful tears,
It could not die.
The world was sinking in a slough
Of sloth, and ease, and selfish greed;
God surely sent this scourge to mould
A nobler creed.
Birth comes with travail; all these woes
Are birth-pangs of the days to be.
Life's noblest things are ever born
In agony.
So--comfort to the stricken heart!
Take solace in the thought that he
You mourn was called by God to such
High dignity.
Love's Riddle
by John Clare

"Unriddle this riddle, my own Jenny love,
Unriddle this riddle for me,
And if ye unriddle the riddle aright,
A kiss your prize shall be,
And if ye riddle the riddle all wrong,
Ye're treble the debt to me:
I'll give thee an apple without any core;
I'll give thee a cherry where stones never be;
I'll give thee a palace, without any door,
And thou shalt unlock it without any key;
I'll give thee a fortune that kings cannot give,
Nor any one take from thee."
"How can there be apples without any core?
How can there be cherries where stones never be?
How can there be houses without any door?
Or doors I may open without any key?
How can'st thou give fortunes that kings cannot give,
When thou art no richer than me?"
"My head is the apple without any core;
In cherries in blossom no stones ever be;
My mind is love's palace without any door,
Which thou can'st unlock, love, without any key.
My heart is the wealth, love, that kings cannot give,
Nor any one take it from thee.
So there are love's riddles, my own Jenny love,
Ye cannot unriddle to me,
And for the one kiss you've so easily lost
I'll make ye give seven to me.
To kiss thee is sweet, but 't is sweeter by far
To be kissed, my dear Jenny, by thee.
Come pay me the forfeit, my own Jenny love;
Thy kisses and cheeks are akin,
And for thy three sweet ones I'll give thee a score
On thy cheeks, and thy lips, and thy chin."
She laughed while he gave her, as much as to say,
"'T were better to lose than to win."
To The Rev. W. Cawthorne Unwin.
by William Cowper

Unwin, I should but ill repay
The kindness of a friend,
Whose worth deserves as warm a lay
As ever friendship penn'd,
Thy name omitted in a page
That would reclaim a vicious age.
A union form'd, as mine with thee,
Not rashly, or in sport,
May be as fervent in degree
And faithful in its sort,
And may as rich in comfort prove,
As that of true fraternal love.
The bud inserted in the rind,
The bud of peach or rose,
Adorns, though differing in its kind,
The stock whereon it grows,
With flower as sweet, or fruit as fair,
As if produced by nature there.
Not rich, I render what I may,
I seize thy name in haste,
And place it in this first essay,
Lest this should prove the last.
'Tis where it should be'in a plan
That hold sin view the good of man.
The poet's lyre, to fix his fame,
Should be the poet's heart;
Affection lights a brighter flame
Than ever blazed by art.
No muses on these lines attend,
I sink the poet in the friend.
Mulford
by John Greenleaf Whittier

Unnoted as the setting of a star
He passed; and sect and party scarcely knew
When from their midst a sage and seer withdrew
To fitter audience, where the great dead are
In God's republic of the heart and mind,
Leaving no purer, nobler soul behind
The Sonnets IV - Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
by William Shakespeare

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th' executor to be.
Lessons
by Sara Teasdale

Unless I learn to ask no help
From any other soul but mine,
To seek no strength in waving reeds
Nor shade beneath a straggling pine;
Unless I learn to look at Grief
Unshrinking from her tear-blind eyes,
And take from Pleasure fearlessly
Whatever gifts will make me wise
Unless I learn these things on earth,
Why was I ever given birth?
One Sea-Side Grave.
by Christina Georgina Rossetti

Unmindful of the roses,
Unmindful of the thorn,
A reaper tired reposes
Among his gathered corn:
So might I, till the morn!
Cold as the cold Decembers,
Past as the days that set,
While only one remembers
And all the rest forget, -
But one remembers yet.
Sonnets From The Portuguese III
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!
Unlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another, as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing.    Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician.    What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head, on mine, the dew,
And Death must dig the level where these agree.
Don Rodrigo. - A Moorish Ballad.
by Victor-Marie Hugo

("Don Roderique est ' la chasse.")
[XXX., May, 1828.]
Unto the chase Rodrigo's gone,
With neither lance nor buckler;
A baleful light his eyes outshone - 
To pity he's no truckler.
He follows not the royal stag,
But, full of fiery hating,
Beside the way one sees him lag,
Impatient at the waiting.
He longs his nephew's blood to spill,
Who 'scaped (the young Mudarra)
That trap he made and laid to kill
The seven sons of Lara.
Along the road - at last, no balk - 
A youth looms on a jennet;
He rises like a sparrow-hawk
About to seize a linnet.
"What ho!" "Who calls?" "Art Christian knight,
Or basely born and boorish,
Or yet that thing I still more slight - 
The spawn of some dog Moorish?
"I seek the by-born spawn of one
I e'er renounce as brother - 
Who chose to make his latest son
Caress a Moor as mother.
"I've sought that cub in every hole,
'Midland, and coast, and islet,
For he's the thief who came and stole
Our sheathless jewelled stilet."
"If you well know the poniard worn
Without edge-dulling cover - 
Look on it now - here, plain, upborne!
And further be no rover.
"Tis I - as sure as you're abhorred
Rodrigo - cruel slayer,
'Tis I am Vengeance, and your lord,
Who bids you crouch in prayer!
"I shall not grant the least delay - 
Use what you have, defending,
I'll send you on that darksome way
Your victims late were wending.
"And if I wore this, with its crest - 
Our seal with gems enwreathing - 
In open air - 'twas in your breast
To seek its fated sheathing!"
Unto What End, I Ask
by Madison Julius Cawein

Unto what end, I ask, unto what end
Is all this effort, this unrest and toil?
Work that avails not? strife and mad turmoil?
Ambitions vain that rack our hearts and rend?
Did labor but avail! did it defend
The soul from its despair, who would recoil
From sweet endeavor then? work that were oil
To still the storms that in the heart contend!
But still to see all effort valueless!
To toil in vain year after weary year
At Song! beholding every other Art
Considered more than Song's high holiness,
The difficult, the beautiful and dear!
Doth break my heart, ah God! doth break my heart!
The Vow Forsworn.
by Charles Hamilton Musgrove

Unweariedly he watches for the sign,
The sign I promised from the farthest goal,
My lover of a world no longer mine,
My human lover with his human soul.
Unweariedly he waits from day to day,
Nor knows, as I know now, that when we meet,
'Twill be as dewdrop on the hawthorn spray,--
The ultimate of God at last complete.
He still remembers that my eyes were blue,
Still dreams the autumn russet of my hair;
"In God's own time," he said, "I'll come to you;
You will be waiting; I will find you there!"
But now I know that he must never hear
The message that I promised to impart,
For should I breathe the secret in his ear
His soul would hearken--but 'twould break his heart!
The Ladder
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Unto each mortal who comes to earth
A ladder is given by God, at birth,
And up this ladder the soul must go,
Step by step, from the valley below;
Step by step, to the centre of space,
On this ladder of lives, to the Starting Place.
In time departed (which yet endures)
I shaped my ladder, and you shaped yours.
Whatever they are - they are what we made:
A ladder of light, or a ladder of shade,
A ladder of love, or a hateful thing,
A ladder of strength, or a wavering string.
A ladder of gold, or a ladder of straw,
Each is the ladder of righteous law.
We flung them away at the call of death,
We took them again with the next life breath.
For a keeper stands by the great birth gates;
As each soul passes, its ladder waits.
Though mine be narrow, and yours be broad,
On my ladder alone can I climb to God.
On your ladder alone can your feet ascend,
For none may borrow, and none may lend.
If toil and trouble and pain are found,
Twisted and corded, to form each round,
If rusted iron or mouldering wood
Is the fragile frame, you must make it good.
You must build it over and fashion it strong,
Though the task be hard as your life is long;
For up this ladder the pathway leads
To earthly pleasures and spirit needs;
And all that may come in another way
Shall be but illusion, and will not stay.
In useless effort, then, waste no time;
Rebuild your ladder, and climb and climb.
Winners Or Losers?
by William Arthur Dunkerley (John Oxenham)

Unless our Souls win back to Thee,
We shall have lost this fight.
Yes, though we win on field and sea,
Though mightier still our might may be,
We still shall lose if we win not Thee.
Help us to climb, as in Thy sight,
The Great High Way of Thy Delight.
It is the world-old strife again,--
The fight 'twixt good and ill.
Since first the curse broke out in Cain,
Each age has worn the grim red chain,
And ill fought good for sake of gain.
Help us, through all life's conflict, still
To battle upwards to Thy Will.
Are we to be like all the rest,
Or climb we loftier height?
Can we our wayward steps arrest?--
All life with nobler life invest?--
And so fulfil our Lord's behest?
Help us, through all the world's dark night,
To struggle upwards to the Light.
If not,--we too shall pass, as passed
The older peoples in their time.
God's pact is sure, His word stands fast,--
Those who His sovereignty outcast
Outcast themselves shall be at last.
So,--lest we pass in this our prime,
Lord, set us to the upward climb!
Comments
by Paul Cameron Brown

...Unrestrained, imaginative writing.
Brown's magic is the vibrating universe,
his sympathy is his ability to receive these vibrations.
Sympathetic Magic captures the movement of life in its intervals - 
his poems resemble stopped action
photographs from a film.
The Mermaid
by George MacDonald

Up cam the tide wi' a burst and a whush,
And back gaed the stanes wi' a whurr;
The king's son walkit i' the evenin hush,
To hear the sea murmur and murr.
Straucht ower the water slade frae the mune
A glimmer o' cauld weet licht;
Ane o' her horns rase the water abune,
And lampit across the nicht.
Quhat's that, and that, far oot i' the gray,
The laich mune bobbin afore?
It's the bonny sea-maidens at their play--
Haud awa, king's son, frae the shore.
Ae rock stude up like an auld aik-root,
The king's son he steppit ahin';
The bonny sea-maidens cam gambolin oot,
Kaimin their hair to the win'.
O merry their lauch whan they fan the warm san',
For the lichtsome reel sae meet!
Ilk are flang her kaim frae her pearly ban',
And tuik til her pearly feet.
But are, wha's beauty was dream and spell,
Her kaim on the rock she cuist;
Her back was scarce turnt whan the munelicht shell
Was lyin i' the prince's breist!
The cluds grew grim as he watched their game,
Th' win' blew up an angry tune;
Ane efter are tuik up her kaim,
And seaward gaed dancin doon.
But are, wi' hair like the mune in a clud,
Was left by the rock her lane;
Wi' flittin ban's, like a priest's, she stude,
'Maist veiled in a rush o' rain.
She spied the prince, she sank at his feet,
And lay like a wreath o' snaw
Meltin awa i' the win' and weet
O' a wastin wastlin thaw.
He liftit her, trimlin wi' houp and dreid,
And hame wi' his prize he gaed,
And laid her doon, like a witherin weed,
Saft on a gowden bed.
A' that nicht, and a' day the neist,
She never liftit heid;
Quaiet lay the sea, and quaiet lay her breist,
And quaiet lay the kirkyard-deid.
But quhan at the gloamin a sea-breeze keen
Blew intil the glimsome room,
Like twa settin stars she opened her een,
And the sea-flooer began to bloom.
And she saw the prince kneelin at her bed,
And afore the mune was new,
Careless and cauld she was wooed and wed--
But a winsome wife she grew.
And a' gaed weel till their bairn was born,
And syne she cudna sleep;
She wud rise at midnicht, and wan'er till morn,
Hark-harkin the sough o' the deep.
Ae nicht whan the win' gaed ravin aboot,
And the winnocks war speckled wi' faem,
Frae room to room she strayt in and oot,
And she spied her pearly kaim.
She twined up her hair wi' eager ban's,
And in wi' the rainbow kaim!
She's oot, and she's aff ower the shinin san's
And awa til her moanin hame!
The prince he startit whaur he lay,
He waukit, and was himlane!
He soucht far intil the mornin gray,
But his bonny sea-wife was gane!
And ever and aye, i' the mirk or the mune,
Whan the win' blew saft frae the sea,
The sad shore up and the sad shore doon
By the lanely rock paced he.
But never again on the sands to play
Cam the maids o' the merry, cauld sea;
He heard them lauch far oot i' the bay,
But hert-alane gaed he.
A Mahommadan Ship Fireman.
by Francis William Lauderdale Adams

Up from the oven pit,
The hell where poor men toil,
At the sunset hour he comes
Clean-clothed, washed from soil.
On the fo'c's'le head he kneels,
His face to the hallowed West.
He prays, and bows and prays.
Does he pray for death and rest?
No Spring.
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Up from the South come the birds that were banished,
Frightened away by the presence of frost.
Back to the vale comes the verdure that vanished,
Back to the forest the leaves that were lost.
Over the hillside the carpet of splendor,
Folded through Winter, Spring spreads down again;
Along the horizon, the tints that were tender,
Lost hues of Summer time, burn bright as then.
Only the mountains' high summits are hoary,
To the ice-fettered river the sun gives a key.
Once more the gleaming shore lists to the story
Told by an amorous Summer-kissed sea.
All things revive that in Winter time perished,
The rose buds again in the light o' the sun,
All that was beautiful, all that was cherished,
Sweet things and dear things and all things - save one.
Late, when the year and the roses were lying
Low with the ruins of Summer and bloom,
Down in the dust fell a love that was dying,
And the snow piled above it, and made it a tomb.
Lo! now! the roses are budded for blossom - 
Lo! now! the Summer is risen again.
Why dost thou bud not, O Love of my bosom?
Why dost thou rise not, and thrill me as then?
Life without love, is a year without Summer,
Heart without love, is a wood without song.
Rise then, revive then, thou indolent comer,
Why dost thou lie in the dark earth so long?
Rise! ah, thou canst not! the rose-tree that sheddest
Its beautiful leaves, in the Spring time may bloom,
But of cold things the coldest, of dead things the deadest,
Love buried once, rises not from the tomb.
Green things may grow on the hillside and heather,
Birds seek the forest and build there and sing.
All things revive in the beautiful weather,
But unto a dead love there cometh no Spring.
Up In The Morning Early
by Robert Burns

Tune - "Cold blows the wind."
Chorus.
Up in the morning's no for me,
Up in the morning early;
When a' the hills are cover'd wi' snaw,
I'm sure it's winter fairly.
I.
Cauld blaws the wind frae east to west,
The drift is driving sairly;
Sae loud and shill I hear the blast,
I'm sure it's winter fairly.
II.
The birds sit chittering in the thorn,
A' day they fare but sparely;
And lang's the night frae e'en to morn,
I'm sure it's winter fairly.
Up in the morning's no for me,
Up in the morning early;
When a' the hills are cover'd wi' snaw,
I'm sure it's winter fairly.
Translations. - The Castle On The Mountain. (From Goethe.)
by George MacDonald

Up there, upon yonder mountain,
Stands a castle old, in the gorse,
Where once, behind doors and portals,
Lurking lay knight and horse.
Burnt are the doors and the portals;
All round it is very still;
Its old walls, tumbled in ruins,
I scramble about at my will.
Close hereby lay a cellar
Full of wine that was old and rare;
But the cheery maid with the pitchers
No more comes down the stair;
No more in the hall, sedately
Sets the beaker before the guest;
No more at the festival stately,
The flagon fills for the priest;
No more to the page so thirsty
Gives a draught in the corridor;
And receives for the hurried favour
The hurried thanks no more.
For every rafter and ceiling
Long ago were to ashes burned,
And stair and passage and chapel
To rubbish and ruin turned.
Yet when, with flask and cittern,
On a day in the summer's prime,
Up to the rocky summit
I watched my darling climb--
Out came the old joy reviving
On the face of the ancient rest,
And on went the old life driving,
In its lordliness and zest;
It seemed as for strangers distinguished
Their state-rooms they did prepare,
And out of that brave time, shadowy
Came stepping a youthful pair.
And the worthy priest in his chapel
Stood already in priestly dress,
And asked--Will you two take one another?
And smiling we answered--Yes;
And the hymns with deep pulsation
Stirred every heart at once;
And instead of the congregation
The echo yelled response.
And when, in the gathered evening,
Profound the stillness grew,
And the red-glowing sun at the broken
Gable came peering through,
Then damsel and page, in his rays, are
Grandees of the olden prime;
She tastes of his cup at her leisure,
And he to thank her takes time.
Ah Ling, The Leper
by Edward Dyson

Up a dark and fetid alley, where the offal and the slime
Of a brave and blusterous city met its misery and crime,
In a hovel reeking pestilence, and noisome as the grave,
Dwelt Ah Ling, the Chinese joiner, and the sweater's willing slave.
Squatting down amongst the shavings, with his chisel and his plane,
Through the long, hot days of striving, dead to pleasure and to pain,
Like a creature barely human, very yellow, gaunt, and grim,
Ah Ling laboured on, for pleasure spread no lures that tempted him.
And the curious people, watching through the rotten wall at night,
Saw his death's face weirdly outlined in the candle's feeble light;
Saw him still intent upon his work, ill-omened and unclean,
Planing, sawing, nailing, hewing'just a skin and bone machine.
Neither kith nor kin the joiner had; perchance he nerved his hand
With the treasured hope of seeing once again his native land
As a Chinaman of fortune, and of finishing his life
At his ease in China Proper, with a painted Chinese wife.
But Ah Ling grew yet more grisly, and 'twas easy now to trace
Signs of vice and fierce privations in his scarred and pitted face,
With a dreadful something added. By this thing the truth was known,
And his countrymen forsook him, and he lived and toiled alone.
Still the work came in, and still he slaved and saw his earnings grow.
Who's to trouble where the goods are made when buyers will not know?
Gimcrack chairs and pretty nick-nacks from infected dens like this
Go to furnish happy homes to-day where ignorance is bliss.
Now the time was come when Ling might take his treasure up, and go
To enjoy celestial comforts by the flowing Hoang Ho,
But one day his shop was raided, and upon him fell the hand
Of the Law'and death were better than the ruthless Law's command.
'Room for the leper, room!' A thing of fear, Ah Ling was torn
From his hovel and his labour and his cherished hopes, and borne
To a home of untold terrors, where to life grim death is wed,
And the quick behold and know the loathly horrors of the dead.
Fi-Fi in Bed
by Robert William Service

Up into the sky I stare;
All the little stars I see;
And I know that God is there
O, how lonely He must be!
Me, I laugh and leap all day,
Till my head begins to nod;
He's so great, He cannot play:
I am glad I am not God.
Poor kind God upon His throne,
Up there in the sky so blue,
Always, always all alone . . .
"Please, dear God, I pity You."