DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
To Laura In Death. Sonnet LIV.
by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)

Mai non vedranno le mie luci asciutte.
TO THE MEMORY OF GIACOMO COLONNA, WHO DIED BEFORE PETRARCH COULD REPLY TO A LETTER OF HIS.
Ne'er shall I see again with eyes unwet,
Or with the sure powers of a tranquil mind,
Those characters where Love so brightly shined,
And his own hand affection seem'd to set;
Spirit! amid earth's strifes unconquer'd yet,
Breathing such sweets from heaven which now has shrined,
As once more to my wandering verse has join'd
The style which Death had led me to forget.
Another work, than my young leaves more bright,
I thought to show: what envying evil star
Snatch'd thee, my noble treasure, thus from me?
So soon who hides thee from my fond heart's sight,
And from thy praise my loving tongue would bar?
My soul has rest, sweet sigh! alone in thee.
MACGREGOR.
Oh! ne'er shall I behold with tearless eye
Or tranquil soul those characters of thine,
In which affection doth so brightly shine,
And charity's own hand I can descry!
Blest soul! that could this earthly strife defy,
Thy sweets instilling from thy home divine,
Thou wakest in me the tone which once was mine,
To sing my rhymes Death's power did long deny.
With these, my brow's young leaves, I fondly dream'd
Another work than this had greeted thee:
What iron planet envied thus our love?
My treasure! veil'd ere age had darkly gleam'd;
Thou--whom my song records--my heart doth see;
Thou wakest my sigh, and sighing, rest I prove.
WOLLASTON.
To My Readers
by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Nay, blame me not; I might have spared
Your patience many a trivial verse,
Yet these my earlier welcome shared,
So, let the better shield the worse.
And some might say, "Those ruder songs
Had freshness which the new have lost;
To spring the opening leaf belongs,
The chestnut-burs await the frost."
When those I wrote, my locks were brown,
When these I write - ah, well a-day!
The autumn thistle's silvery down
Is not the purple bloom of May.
Go, little book, whose pages hold
Those garnered years in loving trust;
How long before your blue and gold
Shall fade and whiten in the dust?
O sexton of the alcoved tomb,
Where souls in leathern cerements lie,
Tell me each living poet's doom!
How long before his book shall die?
It matters little, soon or late,
A day, a month, a year, an age, - 
I read oblivion in its date,
And Finis on its title-page.
Before we sighed, our griefs were told;
Before we smiled, our joys were sung;
And all our passions shaped of old
In accents lost to mortal tongue.
In vain a fresher mould we seek, - 
Can all the varied phrases tell
That Babel's wandering children speak
How thrushes sing or lilacs smell?
Caged in the poet's lonely heart,
Love wastes unheard its tenderest tone;
The soul that sings must dwell apart,
Its inward melodies unknown.
Deal gently with us, ye who read
Our largest hope is unfulfilled, - 
The promise still outruns the deed, - 
The tower, but not the spire, we build.
Our whitest pearl we never find;
Our ripest fruit we never reach;
The flowering moments of the mind
Drop half their petals in our speech.
These are my blossoms; if they wear
One streak of morn or evening's glow,
Accept them; but to me more fair
The buds of song that never blow.
April 8, 1862.
The Daughter Of The Year
by Ellis Parker Butler

Nature, when she made thee, dear,
Begged the treasures of the year.
For thy cheeks, all pink and white,
Spring gave apple blossoms light;
Summer, for thy matchless eyes,
Gave the azure of her skies;
Autumn spun her gold and red
In a mass of silken thread,
Gold and red and sunlight rare
For the wonder of thy hair!
Surly Winter would impart
But his coldness, for thy heart.
Dearest, let the love I bring
Turn thy Winter into Spring.
What are Summer, Spring and Fall,
If thy Winter chills them all?
Near Hastings.
by Toru Dutt

Near Hastings, on the shingle-beach,
We loitered at the time
When ripens on the wall the peach,
The autumn's lovely prime.
Far off,--the sea and sky seemed blent,
The day was wholly done,
The distant town its murmurs sent,
Strangers,--we were alone.
We wandered slow; sick, weary, faint,
Then one of us sat down,
No nature hers, to make complaint;--
The shadows deepened brown.
A lady past,--she was not young,
But oh! her gentle face
No painter-poet ever sung,
Or saw such saintlike grace.
She past us,--then she came again,
Observing at a glance
That we were strangers; one, in pain,--
Then asked,--Were we from France?
We talked awhile,--some roses red
That seemed as wet with tears,
She gave my sister, and she said,
"God bless you both, my dears!"
Sweet were the roses,--sweet and full,
And large as lotus flowers
That in our own wide tanks we cull
To deck our Indian bowers.
But sweeter was the love that gave
Those flowers to one unknown,
I think that He who came to save
The gift a debt will own.
The lady's name I do not know,
Her face no more may see,
But yet, oh yet I love her so!
Blest, happy, may she be!
Her memory will not depart,
Though grief my years should shade,
Still bloom her roses in my heart!
And they shall never fade!
Ne'er Ask The Hour.
by Thomas Moore

Ne'er ask the hour--what is it to us
How Time deals out his treasures?
The golden moments lent us thus,
Are not his coin, but Pleasure's.
If counting them o'er could add to their blisses,
I'd number each glorious second:
But moments of joy are, like Lesbia's kisses,
Too quick and sweet to be reckoned.
Then fill the cup--what is it to us
How time his circle measures?
The fairy hours we call up thus,
Obey no wand but Pleasure's.
Young Joy ne'er thought of counting hours,
Till Care, one summer's morning,
Set up, among his smiling flowers,
A dial, by way of warning.
But Joy loved better to gaze on the sun,
As long as its light was glowing,
Than to watch with old Care how the shadows stole on,
And how fast that light was going.
So fill the cup--what is it to us
How Time his circle measures?
The fairy hours we call up thus,
Obey no wand but Pleasure's.
Memorials Of A Tour In Italy, 1837 - X. - Near Anio's Stream, I Spied A Gentle Dove
by William Wordsworth

Near Anio's stream, I spied a gentle Dove
Perched on an olive branch, and heard her cooing
'Mid new-born blossoms that soft airs were wooing,
While all things present told of joy and love.
But restless Fancy left that olive grove
To hail the exploratory Bird renewing
Hope for the few, who, at the world's undoing,
On the great flood were spared to live and move.
O bounteous Heaven! signs true as dove and bough
Brought to the ark are coming evermore,
Given though we seek them not, but, while we plough
This sea of life without a visible shore,
Do neither promise ask nor grace implore
In what alone is ours, the living Now.
To Helen In A Huff
by Nathaniel Parker Willis

Nay, lady, one frown is enough
In a life as soon over as this,
And though minutes seem long in a huff,
They're minutes 'tis pity to miss!
The smiles you imprison so lightly
Are reckon'd, like days in eclipse;
And though you may smile again brightly,
You've lost so much light from your lips!
Pray, lady, smile!
The cup that is longest untasted
May be with our bliss running o'er,
And, love when we will, we have wasted
An age in not loving before!
Perchance Cupid's forging a fetter
To tie us together some day,
And, just for the chance, we had better
Be laying up love, I should say!
Nay, lady, smile!
Sonnet On Hearing The Dies Irae Sung In The Sistine Chapel
by Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde

Nay, Lord, not thus! white lilies in the spring,
Sad olive-groves, or silver-breasted dove,
Teach me more clearly of Thy life and love
Than terrors of red flame and thundering.
The hillside vines dear memories of Thee bring:
A bird at evening flying to its nest
Tells me of One who had no place of rest:
I think it is of Thee the sparrows sing.
Come rather on some autumn afternoon,
When red and brown are burnished on the leaves,
And the fields echo to the gleaner's song,
Come when the splendid fulness of the moon
Looks down upon the rows of golden sheaves,
And reap Thy harvest: we have waited long.
How The Mead-Slave Was Set Free
by William Vaughn Moody

Nay, move not! Sit just as you are,
Under the carved wings of the chair.
The hearth-glow sifting through your hair
Turns every dim pearl to a star
Dawn-drowned in floods of brightening air.
I have been thinking of that night
When all the wide hall burst to blaze
With spears caught up, thrust fifty ways
To find my throat, while I lay white
And sick with joy, to think the days
I dragged out in your hateful North--
A slave, constrained at banquet's need
To fill the black bull's horns with mead
For drunken sea-thieves--were henceforth
Cast from me as a poison weed,
While Death thrust roses in my hands!
But you, who knew the flowers he had
Were no such roses ripe and glad
As nod in my far southern lands,
But pallid things to make men sad,
Put back the spears with one calm hand,
Raised on your knee my wondering head,
Wiped off the trickling drops of red
From my torn forehead with a strand
Of your bright loosened hair, and said:
"Sea-rovers! would you kill a skald?
This boy has hearkened Odin sing
Unto the clang and winnowing
Of raven's wings. His heart is thralled
To music, as to some strong king;
"And this great thraldom works disdain
Of lesser serving. Once release
These bonds he bears, and he may please
To give you guerdon sweet as rain
To sailors calmed in thirsty seas."
Then, having soothed their rage to rest,
You led me to old Skagi's throne,
Where yellow gold rims in the stone;
And in my arms, against my breast,
Thrust his great harp of walrus bone.
How they came crowding, tunes on tunes!
How good it was to touch the strings
And feel them thrill like happy things
That flutter from the gray cocoons
On hedge rows, in your gradual springs!
All grew a blur before my sight,
As when the stealthy white fog slips
At noonday on the staggering ships;
I saw one single spot of light,
Your white face, with its eager lips--
And so I sang to that. O thou
Who liftedst me from out my shame!
Wert thou content when Skagi came,
Put his own chaplet on my brow,
And bent and kissed his own harp-frame?
Epigram On The Grave Of Robespierre.
by John Carr (Sir)

ORIGINAL.
Passant, ne pleure point son sort;
Car, s'il vivait, tu serais mort.
TRANSLATION.
Nay, passenger, don't mourn his lot;
If he had liv'd, why you had not.
The Transfiguration Of Beauty: A Dialogue With Love.
by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

Dimmi di grazia, amor.
Nay, prithee tell me, Love, when I behold
My lady, do mine eyes her beauty see
In truth, or dwells that loveliness in me
Which multiplies her grace a thousandfold?
Thou needs must know; for thou with her of old
Comest to stir my soul's tranquillity;
Yet would I not seek one sigh less, or be
By loss of that loved flame more simply cold.--
The beauty thou discernest, all is hers;
But grows in radiance as it soars on high
Through mortal eyes unto the soul above:
'Tis there transfigured; for the soul confers
On what she holds, her own divinity:
And this transfigured beauty wins thy love.
Nay, Tell Me Not, Dear.
by Thomas Moore

Nay, tell me not, dear, that the goblet drowns
One charm of feeling, one fond regret;
Believe me, a few of thy angry frowns
Are all I've sunk in its bright wave yet.
Ne'er hath a beam
Been lost in the stream
That ever was shed from thy form or soul;
The spell of those eyes,
The balm of thy sighs,
Still float on the surface, and hallow my bowl,
Then fancy not, dearest, that wine can steal
One blissful dream of the heart from me;
Like founts that awaken the pilgrim's zeal,
The bowl but brightens my love for thee.
They tell us that love in his fairy bower,
Had two blush-roses of birth divine;
He sprinkled the one with a rainbow shower,
But bathed the other with mantling wine.
Soon did the buds,
That drank of the floods
Distilled by the rainbow, decline and fade;
While those which the tide
Of ruby had dyed
All blushed into beauty, like thee, sweet maid!
Then fancy not, dearest, that wine can steal
One blissful dream of the heart from me;
Like founts, that awaken the pilgrim's zeal,
The bowl but brightens my love for thee.
Skunk Hour
by Robert Lowell

For Elizabeth Bishop
Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village,
she's in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The season's ill,
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall,
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl,
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull,
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town....
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,
'Love, O careless Love....' I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat....
I myself am hell,
nobody's here,
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air,
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the
garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
Summer Heat.
by Eugene Field

Nay, why discuss this summer heat,
Of which vain people tell?
Oh, sinner, rather were it meet
To fix thy thoughts on hell!
The punishment ordained for you
In that infernal spot
Is het by Satan's impish crew
And kept forever hot.
Sumatra might be reckoned nice,
And Tophet passing cool,
And Sodom were a cake of ice
Beside that sulphur pool.
An awful stench and dismal wail
Come from the broiling souls,
Whilst Satan with his fireproof tail
Stirs up the brimstone coals.
Oh, sinner, on this end 'tis meet
That thou shouldst ponder well,
For what, oh, what, is worldly heat
Unto the heat of hell?
The Shivering Beggar
by Robert von Ranke Graves

Near Clapham village, where fields began,
Saint Edward met a beggar man.
It was Christmas morning, the church bells tolled,
The old man trembled for the fierce cold.
Saint Edward cried, "It is monstrous sin
A beggar to lie in rags so thin!
An old grey-beard and the frost so keen:
I shall give him my fur-lined gaberdine."
He stripped off his gaberdine of scarlet
And wrapped it round the aged varlet,
Who clutched at the folds with a muttered curse,
Quaking and chattering seven times worse.
Said Edward, "Sir, it would seem you freeze
Most bitter at your extremities.
Here are gloves and shoes and stockings also,
That warm upon your way you may go."
The man took stocking and shoe and glove,
Blaspheming Christ our Saviour's love,
Yet seemed to find but little relief,
Shaking and shivering like a leaf.
Said the saint again, "I have no great riches,
Yet take this tunic, take these breeches,
My shirt and my vest, take everything,
And give due thanks to Jesus the King."
The saint stood naked upon the snow
Long miles from where he was lodged at Bowe,
Praying, "O God! my faith, it grows faint!
This would try the temper of any saint.
"Make clean my heart, Almighty, I pray,
And drive these sinful thoughts away.
Make clean my heart if it be Thy will,
This damned old rascal's shivering still!"
He stooped, he touched the beggar man's shoulder;
He asked him did the frost nip colder?
"Frost!" said the beggar, "no, stupid lad!
'Tis the palsy makes me shiver so bad."
Sonnet XXV.
by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)

Quanto pi' m' avvicino al giorno estremo.
HE CONSOLES HIMSELF THAT HIS LIFE IS ADVANCING TO ITS CLOSE.
Near and more near as life's last period draws,
Which oft is hurried on by human woe,
I see the passing hours more swiftly flow,
And all my hopes in disappointment close.
And to my heart I say, amidst its throes,
"Not long shall we discourse of love below;
For this my earthly load, like new-fall'n snow
Fast melting, soon shall leave us to repose.
With it will sink in dust each towering hope,
Cherish'd so long within my faithful breast;
No more shall we resent, fear, smile, complain:
Then shall we clearly trace why some are blest,
Through deepest misery raised to Fortune's top,
And why so many sighs so oft are heaved in vain."
WRANGHAM.
The nearer I approach my life's last day,
The certain day that limits human woe,
I better mark, in Time's swift silent flow,
How the fond hopes he brought all pass'd away.
Of love no longer--to myself I say--
We now may commune, for, as virgin snow,
The hard and heavy load we drag below
Dissolves and dies, ere rest in heaven repay.
And prostrate with it must each fair hope lie
Which here beguiled us and betray'd so long,
And joy, grief, fear and pride alike shall cease:
And then too shall we see with clearer eye
How oft we trod in weary ways and wrong,
And why so long in vain we sigh'd for peace.
MACGREGOR.
To A Friend Who Sent Me A Box Of Violets
by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

Nay, more than violets
These thoughts of thine, friend!
Rather thy reedy brook--
Taw's tributary--
At midnight murmuring,
Descried them, the delicate
Dark-eyed goddesses,
There by his cressy bed
Dissolved and dreaming
Dreams that distilled into dew
All the purple of night,
All the shine of a planet.
Whereat he whispered;
And they arising--
Of day's forget-me-nots
The duskier sisters--
Descended, relinquished
The orchard, the trout-pool,
Torridge and Tamar,
The Druid circles,
Sheepfolds of Dartmoor,
Granite and sandstone;
By Roughtor, Dozmare,
Down the vale of the Fowey
Moving in silence,
Brushing the nightshade
By bridges cyclopean,
By Trevenna, Treverbyn,
Lawharne and Largin,
By Glynn, Lanhydrock,
Restormel, Lostwithiel,
Dark wood, dim water, dreaming town;
Down the vale of the Fowey
To the tidal water
Washing the feet
Of fair St Winnow--
Each, in her exile
Musing the message,
Passed, as the starlit
Shadow of Ruth from the land of the Moabite.
So they came,
Valley-born, valley-nurtured--
Came to the tideway
The jetties, the anchorage,
The salt wind piping,
Snoring in Equinox,
By ships at anchor,
By quays tormented,
Storm-bitten streets;
Came to the Haven
Crying, "Ah, shelter us,
The strayed ambassadors,
Love's lost legation
On a comfortless coast!"
Nay, but a little sleep,
A little folding
Of petals to the lull
Of quiet rainfalls--
Here in my garden,
In angle sheltered
From north and east wind--
Softly shall recreate
The courage of charity,
Henceforth not to me only
Breathing the message.
Clean-breath'd Sirens!
Hencefore the mariner.
To An Astrologer
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Nay, seer, I do not doubt thy mystic lore,
Nor question that the tenor of my life,
Past, present and the future, is revealed
There in my horoscope. I do believe
That yon dead moon compels the haughty seas
To ebb and flow, and that my natal star
Stands like a stern-browed sentinel in space
And challenges events; nor lets one grief,
Or joy, or failure, or success, pass on
To mar or bless my earthly lot, until
It proves its Karmic right to come to me.
All this I grant, but more than this I know!
Before the solar systems were conceived,
When nothing was but the unnamable,
My spirit lived, an atom of the Cause.
Through countless ages and in many forms
It has existed, ere it entered in
This human frame to serve its little day
Upon the earth. The deathless Me of me,
The spark from that great all-creative fire
Is part of that eternal source called God,
And mightier than the universe.
Why, he
Who knows, and knowing, never once forgets
The pedigree divine of his own soul,
Can conquer, shape and govern destiny
And use vast space as 'twere a board for chess
With stars for pawns; can change his horoscope
To suit his will; turn failure to success,
And from preordained sorrows, harvest joy.
There is no puny planet, sun or moon,
Or zodiacal sign which can control
The God in us! If we bring that to bear
Upon events, we mold them to our wish,
'Tis when the infinite 'neath the finite gropes
That men are governed by their horoscopes.
Alms
by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

Near a large town, along the broad highroad walked an old sick man.
He tottered as he went; his old wasted legs, halting, dragging, stumbling, moved painfully and feebly, as though they did not belong to him; his clothes hung in rags about him; his uncovered head drooped on his breast.... He was utterly worn-out.
He sat down on a stone by the wayside, bent forward, leant his elbows on his knees, hid his face in his hands; and through the knotted fingers the tears dropped down on to the grey, dry dust.
He remembered....
Remembered how he too had been strong and rich, and how he had wasted his health, and had lavished his riches upon others, friends and enemies....
And here, he had not now a crust of bread; and all had forsaken him, friends even before foes.... Must he sink to begging alms? There was bitterness in his heart, and shame.
The tears still dropped and dropped, spotting the grey dust.
Suddenly he heard some one call him by his name; he lifted his weary head, and saw standing before him a stranger.
A face calm and grave, but not stern; eyes not beaming, but clear; a look penetrating, but not unkind.
'Thou hast given away all thy riches,' said a tranquil voice.... 'But thou dost not regret having done good, surely?'
'I regret it not,' answered the old man with a sigh; 'but here I am dying now.'
'And had there been no beggars who held out their hands to thee,' the stranger went on, 'thou wouldst have had none on whom to prove thy goodness; thou couldst not have done thy good works.'
The old man answered nothing, and pondered.
'So be thou also now not proud, poor man,' the stranger began again. 'Go thou, hold out thy hand; do thou too give to other good men a chance to prove in deeds that they are good.'
The old man started, raised his eyes ... but already the stranger had vanished, and in the distance a man came into sight walking along the road.
The old man went up to him, and held out his hand. This man turned away with a surly face, and gave him nothing.
But after him another passed, and he gave the old man some trifling alms.
And the old man bought himself bread with the coppers given him, and sweet to him seemed the morsel gained by begging, and there was no shame in his heart, but the contrary: peace and joy came as a blessing upon him.
May 1878.
Maud
by Henry S. Leigh

Nay, I cannot come into the garden just now,
Tho' it vexes me much to refuse:
But I must have the next set of waltzes, I vow,
With Lieutenant de Boots of the Blues.
I am sure you'll be heartily pleas'd when you hear
That our ball has been quite a success.
As for me, I've been looking a monster, my dear.
In that old-fashion'd guy of a dress.
You had better at once hurry home, dear, to bed;
It is getting so dreadfully late.
You may catch the bronchitis or cold in the head
If you linger so long at our gate.
Don't be obstinate, Alfy; come, take my advice,
For I know you're in want of repose:
Take a basin of gruel (you'll find it so nice),
And remember to tallow your nose.
No, I tell you I can't and I shan't get away,
For De Boots has implor'd me to sing.
As to you, if you like it, of course you can stay,
You were always an obstinate thing.
If you feel it a pleasure to talk to the flow'rs
About "babble and revel and wine,"
When you might have been snoring for two or three hours,
Why, it's not the least business of mine.