DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
June Night In Washington.
by Bliss Carman (William)

The scent of honeysuckle,
Drugging the twilight
With its sweet opiate of lovers' dreams!
The last red glow of the setting sun
On the red brick wall
Of the neighboring house,
And the scramble of red roses over it!
Slowly, slowly
The night smokes up from the city to the stars,
The faint foreshadowed stars;
The smouldering night
Breathes upward like the breath
Of a woman asleep
With dim breast rising and falling
And a smile of delicate dreams.
Softly, softly
The wind comes into the garden,
Like a lover that fears lest he waken his love,
And his hands drip with the scent of the roses
And his locks weep with the opiate odor of honeysuckle.
Sighing, sighing
As a lover that yearns for the lips of his love,
In a torment of bliss,
In a passionate dreaming of bliss,
The wind in the trees of the garden!
How intimate are the trees,--
Rustling like the secret darkness of the soul!
How still is the starlight,--
Aloof in the placidity of dream!
Outside the garden
A group of negroes passing in the street
Sing with ripe lush voices,
Sing with voices that swim
Like great slow gliding fishes
Through the scent of the honeysuckle:
My love's waitin',
Waitin' by the river,
Waitin' till I come along!
Wait there, child; I'm comin'.
Jay-bird tol' me,
Tol' me in the mornin',
Tol' me she'd be there to-night.
Wait there, child; I'm comin'.
Waves of dream!
Spell of the summer night!
Will of the grass that stirs in its sleep!
Desire of the honeysuckle!
And further away,
Like the plash of far-off waves in the fluid night,
The negroes, singing:
Whip-po'-will tol' me,
Tol' me in the evenin',
"Down by the bend where the cat-tails grow."
Wait there, child; I'm comin'.
Lo, the moon,
Like a galleon sailing the night;
And the wash of the moonlight over the roofs and the trees!
Oh, my bride,
Come down from yonder lattice where you bide
Like a charmed princess in a Persian song!
I look up at your yellow window-panes,
Set in the night with far-off wizardry.
Come down, come down; the night is fain of you,
The garden waits your footstep on its walks.
Lo, the moon,
Like a galleon sailing the night;
And the wash of the moonlight over the red brick wall and the roses!
A gleam of lamplight through an open door!
A footfall like the wind's upon the grass!
A rustle like the wind's among the leaves!...
Dim as a dream of pale peach blooms of light,
Blue in the blue soft pallor of the moon,
She comes between the trees as a faint tune
Falls from a flute far off into the night....
So Death might come to one who knew him Love.
Lake Eliza
by Henry Lawson

The sand was heavy on our feet,
A Christmas sky was o'er us,
And half a mile through dust and heat
Lake 'Liza lay before us.
'You'll have a long and heavy tramp',
So said the last adviser,
'You can't do better than to camp
To-night at Lake Eliza.'
We quite forgot our aching shanks,
A cheerful spirit caught us;
We thought of green and shady banks,
We thought of pleasant waters.
'Neath sky as niggard of its rain
As of his gold the miser,
By mulga scrub and lignum plain
We'd tramp'd to Lake Eliza.
A patch to grey discoloured sand,
A fringe of tufty grasses,
A lonely pub in mulga scrub
Is all the stranger passes.
He'd pass the Lake a dozen times
And yet be none the wiser;
I hope that I shall never be
As dry as Lake Eliza.
No patch of green or water seen
To cheer the weary plodder;
The grass is tough as fencing-wire,
And just as good for fodder.
And when I see it mentioned in
Some local ADVERTISER,
'Twill make me laugh, or make me grin,
The name of 'Lake Eliza.'
The Look
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Saviour looked on Peter. Ay, no word,
No gesture of reproach; the Heavens serene
Though heavy with armed justice, did not lean
Their thunders that way: the forsaken Lord
Looked only, on the traitor. None record
What that look was, none guess; for those who have seen
Wronged lovers loving through a death-pang keen,
Or pale-cheeked martyrs smiling to a sword,
Have missed Jehovah at the judgment-call.
And Peter, from the height of blasphemy
'I never knew this man' did quail and fall
As knowing straight that God; and turned free
And went out speechless from the face of all
And filled the silence, weeping bitterly.
The Salamander
by Oliver Herford

The Salamander made his bed
Among the glowing embers red.
A Fiery Furnace, to his mind,
Hygiene and Luxury combined.
He was, if I may put it so,
A Saurian Abednigo.
He loved to climb with nimble ease
The branches of the Gas-log Trees
Where oft on chilly winter nights
He rose to dizzy Fahrenheits.
Believers in Soul Transmigration
See in him the Re-incarnation
Of those Sad Plagues of summer, who
Ask, "Is it hot enough for you?"
Comforts In Contentions.
by Robert Herrick

The same who crowns the conqueror, will be
A coadjutor in the agony.
Perdita
by James Hebblethwaite

The sea coast of Bohemia
Is pleasant to the view
When singing larks spring from the grass
To fade into the blue,
And all the hawthorn hedges break
In wreaths of purest snow,
And yellow daffodils are out,
And roses half in blow.
The sea-coast of Bohemia
Is sad as sad can be,
The prince has ta'en our flower of maids
Across the violet sea;
Our Perdita has gone with him,
No more we dance the round
Upon the green in joyous play,
Or wake the tabor's sound.
The sea-coast of Bohemia
Has many wonders seen,
The shepherd lass wed with a king,
The shepherd with a queen;
But such a wonder as my love
Was never seen before,
It is my joy and sorrow now
To love her evermore.
The sea-coast of Bohemia
Is haunted by a light
Of memory fair of lady's eyes,
And fame of gallant knight;
The princes seek its charm'd strand,
But ah, it was our knell
When o'er the sea our Perdita
Went with young Florizel.
The sea-coast of Bohemia
Is not my resting-place,
For with her waned from out the day
A beauty and a grace:
O had I kissed her on the lips
I would no longer weep,
But live by that until the day
I fall to shade and sleep
The Sands Are Alive With Sunshine
by William Ernest Henley

The sands are alive with sunshine,
The bathers lounge and throng,
And out in the bay a bugle
Is lilting a gallant song.
The clouds go racing eastward,
The blithe wind cannot rest,
And a shard on the shingle flashes
Like the shining soul of a jest;
While children romp in the surges,
And sweethearts wander free,
And the Firth as with laughter dimples . . .
I would it were deep over me!
1875
In Hardwood Groves
by Robert Lee Frost

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.
Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.
They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is way in ours.
The Scroobious Snake
by Edward Lear

The Scroobious Snake,
who always wore a Hat on his Head, for
fear he should bite anybody.
Her Love
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The sands upon the ocean side
That change about with every tide,
And never true to one abide,
A woman's love I liken to.
The summer zephyrs, light and vain,
That sing the same alluring strain
To every grass blade on the plain - 
A woman's love is nothing more.
The sunshine of an April day
That comes to warm you with its ray,
But while you smile has flown away - 
A woman's love is like to this.
God made poor woman with no heart,
But gave her skill, and tact, and art,
And so she lives, and plays her part.
We must not blame, but pity her.
She leans to man - but just to hear
The praise he whispers in her ear;
Herself, not him, she holdeth dear - 
O fool! to be deceived by her.
To sate her selfish thirst she quaffs
The love of strong hearts in sweet draughts,
Then throws them lightly by and laughs,
Too weak to understand their pain.
As changeful as the winds that blow
From every region to and fro,
Devoid of heart, she cannot know
The suffering of a human heart.
Sleeping Beauty
by Walter De La Mare

The scent of bramble fills the air,
Amid her folded sheets she lies,
The gold of evening in her hair,
The blue of morn shut in her eyes.
How many a changing moon hath lit
The unchanging roses of her face!
Her mirror ever broods on it
In silver stillness of the days.
Oft flits the moth on filmy wings
Into his solitary lair;
Shrill evensong the cricket sings
From some still shadow in her hair.
In heat, in snow, in wind, in flood,
She sleeps in lovely loneliness,
Half-folded like an April bud
On winter-haunted trees.
The Salt of the Earth.
by Hattie Howard

The salt of the earth - what a meaningful phrase
From the lips of the Saviour, and one that conveys
A sense of the need of a substance saline
This pestilent sphere to refresh and refine,
And a healthful and happy condition secure
By making it pure as the ocean is pure.
In all the nomenclature known to the race,
In all appellations of people or place,
Was ever a name so befitting, so true
Of those who are seeking the wrong to undo,
With naught of the Pharisee's arrogant air
Their badge of discipleship humbly who wear?
Do beings, forsooth, fashioned out of the mold,
So secretly, strangely, those elements hold
That may be developed in goodness and grace
To shine in demeanor, in form and in face
Till they, by renewal of heavenly birth,
Shall merit their title - the salt of the earth?
To the landsman at home or the sailor at sea,
With nausea, scurvy, or canker maybe,
'Tis never in language to overexalt
The potent preservative virtue of salt - 
A crystal commodity wholesome and good,
A cure for disease, and a savor for food.
Ah, the beasts of the wood and the fowls of the air
Know all of the need of this condiment rare,
Know well where the springs and the "salt-licks" abound,
Where streams salinaceous flow out of the ground;
And their cravings appease by sipping the brine
With more than the relish of topers at wine.
Our wants may be legion, our needs are but few,
And every known ill hath its remedy true;
'Tis ours to discover and give to mankind
Of hidden essentials the best that we find;
'Tis ours to eradicate error and sin,
And help to make better the place we are in.
If ever this world from corruption is free,
And righteousness reign in the kingdom to be,
Like salt in its simple and soluble way
Infusing malodor, preventing decay.
So human endeavor in action sublime
Must never relax till the finale of time.
To thousands discouraged this comforting truth
Appeals like the promise of infinite youth:
To know, as they labor like bees in the hive,
Yet do little more than keep goodness alive - 
To know that the Master accredits their worth
As blessed disciples - "the salt of the earth."
Rhymes And Rhythms - XX
by William Ernest Henley

The shadow of Dawn;
Stillness and stars and over-mastering dreams
Of Life and Death and Sleep;
Heard over gleaming flats the old unchanging sound
Of the old unchanging Sea.
My soul and yours,
O hand in hand let us fare forth, two ghosts,
Into the ghostliness,
The infinite and abounding solitudes,
Beyond, O beyond! beyond . . .
Here in the porch
Upon the multitudinous silences
Of the kingdoms of the grave,
We twain are you and I, two ghosts Omnipotence
Can touch no more, no more!
Last Words of Sir Henry Lawrence.
by Harriet Annie Wilkins

"Let there be no fuss about me, bury me with my men."
The shades of death were gathering thick around a soldier's head,
A war stained, dust strewn band of men gathered around his bed.
"Comrade, good-bye; thank God your voice may cheer the dauntless brave
When I, your friend and countryman, am resting in the grave.
Hush, soldiers, hush, no word of thanks, it is little I have done
For the glory of the land we love, toward the setting sun.
I have but one request to make: When all is over, then
Let there be no fuss about me, bury me with my men.
Heap up no splendid monument in memory of my clay,
No tributary words to tell of one who's far away;
It matters not to passers by where lies my crumbling dust,
The cherubim and seraphim may have it in their trust;
And bones of better men than I have bleached all cold and white
Where scorching sunbeam goes by day and the prowling beast by night.
Give me a few spare feet of earth away down in the glen,
Breathing the words of faith and hope, bury me with the men.
Bury me with the men; when the fearful seige was gained,
With British blood and British dead the Indian soil was stained.
Poor Dugald lay that fearful night and never asked for aid,
And Fraser, wounded, cheered us on, and Allan, dying, prayed,
And brave Macdonald cheered the flag with his expiring breath.
These are the men who jeopardised their lives unto the death,
They drove the murderous Sepoys back, the wild wolf to his den;
All honor to their noble hearts; bury me with my men.
Is it death that's coming nearer? how clammy grows my brow;
Yes, I'm going home for promotion, the battle's over now.
Comrades, I often fancy, how upon yon blessed shore,
In that land of recognition, we may yet all meet once more.
Colonel, we'll gather round you then, as in the days of old;
Why do whisper, comrades, are my fingers growing cold?
Oh, tell my brother-officers that I thought about them when
I was going across the river; bury me with my men.
How very dark it's growing, I suppose it's nearly night;
Well, I think we shall see England in the morning's ruddy light.
And my mother and my sister surely I see them stand
Upon the beach, and summer flowers waving in each hand;
And sounds of joy and victory comes on the evening air.
Colonel, if I go down home first, you'll come and see us there?
Do I hear my comrades sighing? Where am I? ah, amen.
Let there be no fuss about me, bury me with my men.
Excelsior
by William F. Kirk

The shades of night ban falling fast,
Ven tru Dakota willage passed
Young faller who skol carry flag
And yell, so loud sum he can brag,
"Excelsior!"
Ay ant know yust vat he skol mean,
But yust lak dis har talk machine
He keep on saying, night and day
(Ay s'pose to passing time avay),
"Excelsior!"
Swen Swenson tal me dis har guy
Ban crazy; den he tal me why.
He say dis faller once ban gay
And happy; den he never say
"Excelsior!"
But after while, say Sven, he meet
A chorus girl who look quite sveet,
And marry her, and den find out
Vat making her so plump and stout - 
"Excelsior!"
So now poor faller have to go,
Lak lunatic, tru ice and snow.
He tenk about his old girl May,
And dis ban all vich he can say - 
"Excelsior!"
The Shadow Of Dawn
by William Ernest Henley

The shadow of Dawn;
Stillness and stars and over-mastering dreams
Of Life and Death and Sleep;
Heard over gleaming flats, the old, unchanging sound
Of the old, unchanging Sea.
My soul and yours -
O, hand in hand let us fare forth, two ghosts,
Into the ghostliness,
The infinite and abounding solitudes,
Beyond - O, beyond! - beyond . . .
Here in the porch
Upon the multitudinous silences
Of the kingdoms of the grave,
We twain are you and I - two ghosts Omnipotence
Can touch no more . . . no more!
Pelagius
by Algernon Charles Swinburne

I.
The sea shall praise him and the shores bear part
That reared him when the bright south world was black
With fume of creeds more foul than hell's own rack,
Still darkening more love's face with loveless art
Since Paul, faith's fervent Antichrist, of heart
Heroic, haled the world vehemently back
From Christ's pure path on dire Jehovah's track,
And said to dark Elisha's Lord, 'Thou art.'
But one whose soul had put the raiment on
Of love that Jesus left with James and John
Withstood that Lord whose seals of love were lies,
Seeing what we see how, touched by Truth's bright rod,
The fiend whom Jews and Africans called God
Feels his own hell take hold on him, and dies.
II.
The world has no such flower in any land,
And no such pearl in any gulf the sea,
As any babe on any mother's knee.
But all things blessed of men by saints are banned:
God gives them grace to read and understand
The palimpsest of evil, writ where we,
Poor fools and lovers but of love, can see
Nought save a blessing signed by Love's own hand.
The smile that opens heaven on us for them
Hath sin's transmitted birthmark hid therein:
The kiss it craves calls down from heaven a rod.
If innocence be sin that Gods condemn,
Praise we the men who so being born in sin
First dared the doom and broke the bonds of God.
III.
Man's heel is on the Almighty's neck who said,
Let there be hell, and there was hell on earth.
But not for that may men forget their worth
Nay, but much more remember them who led
The living first from dwellings of the dead,
And rent the cerecloths that were wont to engirth
Souls wrapped and swathed and swaddled from their birth
With lies that bound them fast from heel to head.
Among the tombs when wise men all their lives
Dwelt, and cried out, and cut themselves with knives,
These men, being foolish, and of saints abhorred,
Beheld in heaven the sun by saints reviled,
Love, and on earth one everlasting Lord
In every likeness of a little child.
A Hymn Of The Sea.
by William Cullen Bryant

The sea is mighty, but a mightier sways
His restless billows. Thou, whose hands have scooped
His boundless gulfs and built his shore, thy breath,
That moved in the beginning o'er his face,
Moves o'er it evermore. The obedient waves
To its strong motion roll, and rise and fall.
Still from that realm of rain thy cloud goes up,
As at the first, to water the great earth,
And keep her valleys green. A hundred realms
Watch its broad shadow warping on the wind,
And in the dropping shower, with gladness hear
Thy promise of the harvest. I look forth
Over the boundless blue, where joyously
The bright crests of innumerable waves
Glance to the sun at once, as when the hands
Of a great multitude are upward flung
In acclamation. I behold the ships
Gliding from cape to cape, from isle to isle,
Or stemming toward far lands, or hastening home
From the old world. It is thy friendly breeze
That bears them, with the riches of the land,
And treasure of dear lives, till, in the port,
The shouting seaman climbs and furls the sail.
But who shall bide thy tempest, who shall face
The blast that wakes the fury of the sea?
Oh God! thy justice makes the world turn pale,
When on the armed fleet, that royally
Bears down the surges, carrying war, to smite
Some city, or invade some thoughtless realm,
Descends the fierce tornado. The vast hulks
Are whirled like chaff upon the waves; the sails
Fly, rent like webs of gossamer; the masts
Are snapped asunder; downward from the decks,
Downward are slung, into the fathomless gulf,
Their cruel engines; and their hosts, arrayed
In trappings of the battle-field, are whelmed
By whirlpools, or dashed dead upon the rocks.
Then stand the nations still with awe, and pause,
A moment, from the bloody work of war.
These restless surges eat away the shores
Of earth's old continents; the fertile plain
Welters in shallows, headlands crumble down,
And the tide drifts the sea-sand in the streets
Of the drowned city. Thou, meanwhile, afar
In the green chambers of the middle sea,
Where broadest spread the waters and the line
Sinks deepest, while no eye beholds thy work,
Creator! thou dost teach the coral worm
To lay his mighty reefs. From age to age,
He builds beneath the waters, till, at last,
His bulwarks overtop the brine, and check
The long wave rolling from the southern pole
To break upon Japan. Thou bid'st the fires,
That smoulder under ocean, heave on high
The new-made mountains, and uplift their peaks,
A place of refuge for the storm-driven bird.
The birds and wafting billows plant the rifts
With herb and tree; sweet fountains gush; sweet airs
Ripple the living lakes that, fringed with flowers,
Are gathered in the hollows. Thou dost look
On thy creation and pronounce it good.
Its valleys, glorious with their summer green,
Praise thee in silent beauty, and its woods,
Swept by the murmuring winds of ocean, join
The murmuring shores in a perpetual hymn.
In A Poem
by Robert Lee Frost

The sentencing goes blithely on its way
And takes the playfully objected rhyme
As surely as it takes the stroke and time
In having its undeviable say.
The Separated Women
by Henry Lawson

The Separated Women
Go lying through the land,
For they have plenty dresses,
And money, too, in hand;
They married brutes and drunkards
And blackguards 'frightful low',
But why are they so eager
For all the world to know?
The shamed and ill-used woman
Who really longs to die,
She slaves at home in silence
And hides her poor black eye!
She lives a life of terror
Eased off at times in woe,
But why is she so frightened
That any one might know?
The Separated Woman
She rushes to the court,
Sad, shabby and pathetic,
Or flaunting or distraught;
The real wronged wife would rather
Lose both eyes and her hair,
She swears a lie to save him
When he is taken there.
The Separated Woman
She mostly goes the same,
Bag-woman, sham-nurse, 'pretty',
Or on her husband's name;
The real loafed-on woman,
With courage almost grim,
'Goes out' and takes in washing
To keep the kids, and him.
The Separated Woman,
I knew her course so well:
'The Stage', then first-class barmaid,
Then third-class bar, and hell:
And 'hell' means all things vicious
That prey upon the town
(She wishes her poor husband
Had sometimes knocked her down).
Masseur and manicurist,
Or anything by chance,
They vilify their husbands,
And draw the maintenance.
Sham artists, 'music teachers',
Oh! they are flinty nuts!
Their friends are man-shaped crawlers
And lower than the dust.
The separated 'Monsters'
Are missing from the tale,
They seem to have cleared out, or,
Perhaps they are in gaol.
The separated husband
Is heard of here and there,
A mild and decent citizen
And mostly bowed with care.
The Separated Women,
When upset in the track,
Are often very eager
To take the 'Monster' back.
They've moved all hell to crush him
And, startled, find too late
The Monster's grown content with
The separated state.
Mrs. Sibley
by Edgar Lee Masters

The secret of the stars - gravitation.
The secret of the earth - layers of rock.
The secret of the soil - to receive seed.
The secret of the seed - the germ.
The secret of man - the sower.
The secret of woman - the soil.
My secret: Under a mound that you shall never find.
The Doctors.
by Jean de La Fontaine

[1]
The selfsame patient put to test
Two doctors, Fear-the-worst and Hope-the-best.
The latter hoped; the former did maintain
The man would take all medicine in vain.
By different cures the patient was beset,
But erelong cancell'd nature's debt,
While nursed
As was prescribed by Fear-the-worst.
But over the disease both triumph'd still.
Said one, 'I well foresaw his death.'
'Yes,' said the other, 'but my pill
Would certainly have saved his breath.'
Nearing Christmas
by Madison Julius Cawein

The season of the rose and peace is past:
It could not last.
There's heartbreak in the hills and stormy sighs
Of sorrow in the rain-lashed plains and skies,
While Earth regards, aghast,
The last red leaf that flies.
The world is cringing in the darkness where
War left his lair,
And everything takes on a lupine look,
Baring gaunt teeth at every peaceful nook,
And shaking torrent hair
At every little brook.
Cancers of ulcerous flame his eyes, and hark!
There in the dark
The ponderous stir of metal, iron feet;
And with it, heard around the world, the beat
Of Battle; sounds that mark
His heart's advance, retreat.
With shrapnel pipes he goes his monstrous ways;
And, screeching, plays
The hell-born music Havoc dances to;
And, following with his skeleton-headed crew
Of ravening Nights and Days,
Horror invades the blue.
Against the Heaven he lifts a mailed fist
And writes a list
Of beautiful cities on the ghastly sky:
And underneath them, with no reason why,
In blood and tears and mist,
The postscript, "These must die!"
Change is the portion and chief heritage
Of every Age.
The spirit of God still waits its time. And War
May blur His message for a while, and mar
The writing on His page,
To this our sorrowful star.
But there above the conflict, orbed in rays,
Is drawn the face
Of Peace; at last who comes into her own;
Peace, from whose tomb the world shall roll the stone,
And give her highest place
In the human heart alone.