DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
My Annual
by Oliver Wendell Holmes

How long will this harp which you once loved to hear
Cheat your lips of a smile or your eyes of a tear?
How long stir the echoes it wakened of old,
While its strings were unbroken, untarnished its gold?
Dear friends of my boyhood, my words do you wrong;
The heart, the heart only, shall throb in my song;
It reads the kind answer that looks from your eyes, - 
"We will bid our old harper play on till he dies."
Though Youth, the fair angel that looked o'er the strings,
Has lost the bright glory that gleamed on his wings,
Though the freshness of morning has passed from its tone
It is still the old harp that was always your own.
I claim not its music, - each note it affords
I strike from your heart-strings, that lend me its chords;
I know you will listen and love to the last,
For it trembles and thrills with the voice of your past.
Ah, brothers! dear brothers! the harp that I hold
No craftsman could string and no artisan mould;
He shaped it, He strung it, who fashioned the lyres
That ring with the hymns of the seraphim choirs.
Not mine are the visions of beauty it brings,
Not mine the faint fragrance around it that clings;
Those shapes are the phantoms of years that are fled,
Those sweets breathe from roses your summers have shed.
Each hour of the past lends its tribute to this,
Till it blooms like a bower in the Garden of Bliss;
The thorn and the thistle may grow as they will,
Where Friendship unfolds there is Paradise still.
The bird wanders careless while summer is green,
The leaf-hidden cradle that rocked him unseen;
When Autumn's rude fingers the woods have undressed,
The boughs may look bare, but they show him his nest.
Too precious these moments! the lustre they fling
Is the light of our year, is the gem of its ring,
So brimming with sunshine, we almost forget
The rays it has lost, and its border of jet.
While round us the many-hued halo is shed,
How dear are the living, how near are the dead!
One circle, scarce broken, these waiting below,
Those walking the shores where the asphodels blow!
Not life shall enlarge it nor death shall divide, - 
No brother new-born finds his place at my side;
No titles shall freeze us, no grandeurs infest,
His Honor, His Worship, are boys like the rest.
Some won the world's homage, their names we hold dear, - 
But Friendship, not Fame, is the countersign here;
Make room by the conqueror crowned in the strife
For the comrade that limps from the battle of life!
What tongue talks of battle? Too long we have heard
In sorrow, in anguish, that terrible word;
It reddened the sunshine, it crimsoned the wave,
It sprinkled our doors with the blood of our brave.
Peace, Peace comes at last, with her garland of white;
Peace broods in all hearts as we gather to-night;
The blazon of Union spreads full in the sun;
We echo its words, - We are one! We are one!
A Child Asleep
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How he sleepeth! having drunken
Weary childhood's mandragore,
From his pretty eyes have sunken
Pleasures, to make room for more
Sleeping near the withered nosegay, which he pulled the day before.
Nosegays! leave them for the waking:
Throw them earthward where they grew.
Dim are such, beside the breaking
Amaranths he looks unto
Folded eyes see brighter colours than the open ever do.
Heaven-flowers, rayed by shadows golden
From the paths they sprang beneath,
Now perhaps divinely holden,
Swing against him in a wreath
We may think so from the quickening of his bloom and of his breath.
Vision unto vision calleth,
While the young child dreameth on.
Fair, O dreamer, thee befalleth
With the glory thou hast won!
Darker wert thou in the garden, yestermorn, by summer sun.
We should see the spirits ringing
Round thee, were the clouds away.
'Tis the child-heart draws them, singing
In the silent-seeming clay
Singing! Stars that seem the mutest, go in music all the way.
As the moths around a taper,
As the bees around a rose,
As the gnats around a vapour,
So the Spirits group and close
Round about a holy childhood, as if drinking its repose.
Shapes of brightness overlean thee,
Flash their diadems of youth
On the ringlets which half screen thee,
While thou smilest, . . . not in sooth
Thy smile . . . but the overfair one, dropt from some aethereal mouth.
Haply it is angels' duty,
During slumber, shade by shade:
To fine down this childish beauty
To the thing it must be made,
Ere the world shall bring it praises, or the tomb shall see it fade.
Softly, softly! make no noises!
Now he lieth dead and dumb
Now he hears the angels' voices
Folding silence in the room
Now he muses deep the meaning of the Heaven-words as they come.
Speak not! he is consecrated
Breathe no breath across his eyes.
Lifted up and separated,
On the hand of God he lies,
In a sweetness beyond touching held in cloistral sanctities.
Could ye bless him father mother ?
Bless the dimple in his cheek?
Dare ye look at one another,
And the benediction speak?
Would ye not break out in weeping, and confess yourselves too weak?
He is harmless ye are sinful,
Ye are troubled he, at ease:
From his slumber, virtue winful
Floweth outward with increase
Dare not bless him! but be blessed by his peace and go in peace.
Democritus And The People Of Abdera (Prose Fable)
by Jean de La Fontaine

How I have always hated the opinions of the mob! To me, a mob seems profane, unjust, and rash, putting false construction on all things, and judging every matter by a mob-made standard.
Democritus had experience of this. His countrymen thought him mad. Little minds! But then, no one is a prophet in his own country! The people themselves were mad, of course, and Democritus was the wise man. Nevertheless the error went so far that the city of Abdera[6] sent a messenger to the great physician Hippocrates, requesting him both by letter and by spoken word to come and restore the sage's reason.
"Our citizen," said the spokesman with tears in his eyes, "has lost his wits, alas! Study has corrupted Democritus. If he were less wise we should esteem him much more. He will have it that there is no limit to the number of worlds like ours and that possibly they are inhabited with numberless Democrituses. Not satisfied with these wild dreams, he talks also of atoms - phantoms born only in his own empty brain. Then, measuring the very heavens, though he remains here below to do it, he claims to know the universe; yet admits that he does not know himself. Time was when he could control debates, now he mutters only to himself. So come, thou divine mortal, for the patient's case is a bad one."
Hippocrates, though he had little faith in these people, went nevertheless. Now mark, I beg of you, what strange meetings fate may bring about in this life! Hippocrates arrived just at the time when this man, who was supposed to have neither sense nor reason, happened to be searching into a question as to whether this very reason was seated in the heart or in the head of men and beasts.
Sitting in leafy shade, beside a brook, and with many a volume at his feet, he was occupied wholly with a study of the convolutions of the brain; and thus absorbed, as his manner was, he scarcely noticed the advance of his friend the learned physician. Their greeting was soon over as you may imagine, for the sage is at all times chary of time and speech. So having put aside mere trifles of conversation, they reasoned upon man and his mind, and next fell to talking upon ethics.
It is not necessary that I should here enlarge upon what each had to say to the other on these matters.
The little tale suffices to show that we may rightly take exception to the judgments of the mob. That being so, in what sense is it true, as I have read in a certain passage, that the voice of the people is the voice of God?
How In All Wonder Columbus Got Over
by Arthur Hugh Clough

How in all wonder Columbus got over,
That is a marvel to me, I protest,
Cabot, and Raleigh too, that well-read rover,
Frobisher, Dampier, Drake and the rest.
Bad enough all the same,
For them that after came,
But, in great Heaven's name,
How he should ever think
That on the other brink
Of this huge waste terra firma should be,
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me.
How a man ever should hope to get thither,
E'e'n if he knew of there being another side;
But to suppose he should come any whither,
Sailing right on into chaos untried,
Across the whole ocean,
In spite of the motion,
To stick to the notion
That in some nook or bend
Of a sea without end
He should find North and South Amerikee,
Was a pure madness as it seems to me.
What if wise men had, as far back as Ptolemy,
Judged that the earth like an orange was round,
None of them ever said, 'Come along, follow,
Sail to the West, and the East will be found.'
Many a day before
Ever they'd touched the shore
Of the San Salvador,
Sadder and wiser men
They'd have turned back again;
And that he did not, but did cross the sea,
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me.
And that he crossed and that we cross the sea
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me.
The Glowworm
by Madison Julius Cawein

How long had I sat there and had not beheld
The gleam of the glow-worm till something compelled!...
The heaven was starless, the forest was deep,
And the vistas of darkness stretched silent in sleep.
And late 'mid the trees had I lingered until
No thing was awake but the lone whippoorwill.
And haunted of thoughts for an hour I sat
On a lichen-gray rock where the moss was a mat.
And thinking of one whom my heart had held dear,
Like terrible waters, a gathering fear.
Came stealing upon me with all the distress
Of loss and of yearning and powerlessness:
Till the hopes and the doubts and the sleepless unrest
That, swallow-like, built in the home of my breast,
Now hither, now thither, now heavenward flew,
Wild-winged as the winds are: now suddenly drew
My soul to abysses of nothingness where
All light was a shadow, all hope, a despair:
Where truth, that religion had set upon high,
The darkness distorted and changed to a lie:
And dreams of the beauty ambition had fed
Like leaves of the autumn fell blighted and dead.
And I rose with my burden of anguish and doom,
And cried, "O my God, had I died in the womb!
"Than born into night, with no hope of the morn,
An heir unto shadows, to live so forlorn!
"All effort is vain; and the planet called Faith
Sinks down; and no power is real but death.
"Oh, light me a torch in the deepening dark
So my sick soul may follow, my sad heart may mark!"--
And then in the darkness the answer!--It came
From Earth not from Heaven--a glimmering flame,
Behold, at my feet! In the shadow it shone
Mysteriously lovely and dimly alone:
An ember; a sparkle of dew and of glower;
Like the lamp that a spirit hangs under a flower:
As goldenly green as the phosphorus star
A fairy may wear in her diadem's bar:
An element essence of moonlight and dawn
That, trodden and trampled, burns on and burns on.
And hushed was my soul with the lesson of light
That God had revealed to me there in the night:
Though mortal its structure, material its form,
The spiritual message of worm unto worm.
In The Crowd.
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

How happy they are, in all seeming,
How gay, or how smilingly proud,
How brightly their faces are beaming,
These people who make up the crowd.
How they bow, how they bend, how they flutter,
How they look at each other and smile,
How they glow, and what bon mots they utter!
But a strange thought has found me the while!
It is odd, but I stand here and fancy
These people who now play a part,
All forced by some strange necromancy
To speak, and to act, from the heart.
What a hush would come over the laughter!
What a silence would fall on the mirth!
And then what a wail would sweep after,
As the night-wind sweeps over the earth.
If the secrets held under and hidden
In the intricate hearts of the crowd,
Were suddenly called to, and bidden
To rise up and cry out aloud,
How strange one would look to another!
Old friends of long standing and years - 
Own brothers would not know each other,
Robed new in their sorrows and fears.
From broadcloth, and velvet, and laces,
Would echo the groans of despair,
And there would be blanching of faces
And wringing of hands and of hair.
That man with his record of honor,
That lady down there with the rose,
That girl with Spring's freshness upon her,
Who knoweth the secrets of those?
Smile on, O ye maskers, smile sweetly!
Step lightly, bow low and laugh loud!
Though the world is deceived and completely,
I know ye, O sad-hearted crowd!
I watch you with infinite pity:
But play on, play ever your part,
Be gleeful, be joyful, be witty!
'Tis better than showing the heart.
The Summer Moon
by Clark Ashton Smith

How is it, O moon, that melting,
Unstintedly, prodigally,
On the peaks' hard majesty,
Till they seem diaphanous
And fluctuant as a veil,
And pouring thy rapturous light
Through pine, and oak, and laurel,
Till the summer-sharpened green,
Softening and tremulous,
Is a lustrous miracle -
How is it that I find,
When I turn again to thee,
That thy lost and wasted light
Is regained in one magic breath?
The Dancing Serpent
by Charles Baudelaire

How I adore, dear indolent,
Your lovely body, when
Like silken cloth it shimmers
Your sleek and glimmering skin!
Within the ocean of your hair,
All pungent with perfumes,
A fragrant and a wayward sea
Of waves of browns and blues,
Like a brave ship awakening
To winds at break of day,
My dreamy soul sets forth on course
For skies so far away.
Your eyes, where nothing is revealed,
The bitter nor the sweet,
Are two cold stones, in which the tinctures
Gold and iron meet.
Viewing the rhythm of your walk,
Beautifully dissolute,
One seems to see a serpent dance
Before a wand and flute.
Your childlike head lolls with the weight
Of all your idleness,
And sways with all the slackness of
A baby elephant's,
And your lithe body bends and stretches
Like a splendid barque
That rolls from side to side and wets
With seas its tipping yards.
As when the booming glaciers thaw
They swell the waves beneath,
When your mouth's water floods into
The borders of your teeth,
I know I drink a gypsy wine,
Bitter, subduing, tart,
A liquid sky that strews and spangles
Stars across my heart!
The Sonnets XCVII - How like a winter hath my absence been
by William Shakespeare

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer's time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans, and unfather'd fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.
Impromptu, In Reply To A Lady, Who Asked The Author What Childhood Resembled.
by John Carr (Sir)

How like is childhood to the lucid tide
That calmly wanders thro' the mossy dell,
Sweeps o'er the lily by the margin's side,
And, as it kisses, murmurs out, Farewell!
To Mr. Dryden
by Joseph Addison

How long, great Poet, shall thy sacred lays
Provoke our wonder, and transcend our praise?
Can neither injuries of time, or age,
Damp thy poetic heat, and quench thy rage?
No so thy Ovid in his exile wrote,
Grief chill'd his breast,and check'd his rising thought:
Pensive and sad, his drooping Muse betrays
The Roman genius in its last decays.
Prevailing warmth has still thy mind possest,
And second youth is kindled in thy breast;
Thou mak'st the beauties of the Romans known,
And England boasts of riches not her own;
Thy lines have heighten'd Virgil's majesty,
And Horace wonders at himself in thee.
Thou teachest Persius to inform our isle
In smoother numbers, and a clearer style;
And Juvenal, instructed in thy page,
Edges his satire, and improves his rage,
Thy copy casts a fairer light on all,
And still out-shines, the bright original.
Now Ovid boasts th' advantage of thy song,
And tells his story in the British tongue;
Thy charming verse, and fair translations, show
How thy own laurel first began to grow:
How wild Lycaon, chang'd by angry gods,
And frighted at himself, ran howling through the woods.
O may'st thou still the noble talk prolong,
Nor age, nor sickness, interrupt thy song:
Then may we wondering read, how human limbs
Have water'd kingdoms, and dissolv'd in streams;
Of those rich fruits that on the fertile mold
Turn'd yellow by degrees, and ripen'd into gold:
How some in feathers, or a ragged hide,
Have liv'd a second life, and different natures try'd.
Then will thy Ovid, thus transform'd, reveal
A nobler change than he himself can tell.
Simplicity.
by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And does n't care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.
How Is It That I Am Now So Softly Awakened
by Conrad Potter Aiken

How is it that I am now so softly awakened,
My leaves shaken down with music?
Darling, I love you.
It is not your mouth, for I have known mouths before,
Though your mouth is more alive than roses,
Roses singing softly
To green leaves after rain.
It is not your eyes, for I have dived often in eyes,
Though your eyes, even in the yellow glare of footlights,
Are windows into eternal dusk.
Nor is it the live white flashing of your feet,
Nor your gay hands, catching at motes in the spotlight;
Nor the abrupt thick music of your laughter,
When, against the hideous backdrop,
With all its crudities brilliantly lighted,
Suddenly you catch sight of your alarming shadow,
Whirling and contracting.
How is it, then, that I am so keenly aware,
So sensitive to the surges of the wind, or the light,
Heaving silently under blue seas of air?
Darling, I love you, I am immersed in you.
It is not the unraveled night-time of your hair,
Though I grow drunk when you press it upon my face:
And though when you gloss its length with a golden brush
I am strings that tremble under a bow.
It was that night I saw you dancing,
The whirl and impalpable float of your garment,
Your throat lifted, your face aglow
(Like waterlilies in moonlight were your knees).
It was that night I heard you singing
In the green-room after your dance was over,
Faint and uneven through the thickness of walls.
(How shall I come to you through the dullness of walls,
Thrusting aside the hands of bitter opinion?)
It was that afternoon, early in June,
When, tired with a sleepless night, and my act performed,
Feeling as stale as streets,
We met under dropping boughs, and you smiled to me:
And we sat by a watery surface of clouds and sky.
I hear only the susurration of intimate leaves;
The stealthy gliding of branches upon slow air.
I see only the point of your chin in sunlight;
And the sinister blue of sunlight on your hair.
The sunlight settles downward upon us in silence.
Now we thrust up through grass blades and encounter,
Pushing white hands amid the green.
Your face flowers whitely among cold leaves.
Soil clings to you, bark falls from you,
You rouse and stretch upward, exhaling earth, inhaling sky,
I touch you, and we drift off together like moons.
Earth dips from under.
We are alone in an immensity of sunlight,
Specks in an infinite golden radiance,
Whirled and tossed upon silent cataracts and torrents.
Give me your hand darling! We float downward.
Moonshiners
by Madison Julius Cawein

How long we had hid there and listened,
Where the trees let in winks o' the sun,
'Fore their Winchesters glittered and glistened
In the gully below by the run,
I never kep' count. It wuz mornin',
An' my legs wuz stove stiff with the chill
O' the night. But my Lize had the warnin'
An' we knew it wuz up with the still
If we ever give up with our watchin':
The six on us me an' Bud Roe,
Two Tollivers, Dickon an' Hotchin
An' the posse nigh twenty or so.
The evenin' before we had reckoned
The sheriff would ride through the glen;
An' it took little less nor a second
To see how we manage it then;
For the valley wound up in a' alley,
Blind-walled with bald bluffs; an' no trees
At its bottom; a trap of a valley,
Scrub thicket not high as my knees.
With me an' the Tollivers watchin'
The rear, an' Bud Roe in the gap,
With Dickon an' Hotch for the scotchin',
We had 'em like rats in a trap.
So we all took a pull at the bottle
Lize brung me last evenin': an' though
We 'd eaten, nor left whut would throttle
A fly, we wuz hungry I know.
Then a caw come hoarse through the quiet:
We knew it the signal they'd reached
The gully: an' when they'd passed by it,
A hawk we had fixed it jest screeched:
When a pewee had whistled, we knew it
The signal the posse wuz in,
Safe into the trap. . . . They would do it!
An' we we wuz glad to begin.
A pistol each side an' a rifle
Or two ready loaded. Our height
Would help me to aim jest a trifle
To left an' my pards front an' right.
An' we laid in the rocks, never winkin'
Jest ready. I heard the dry buzz
O' the grasshoppers; thinkin' an' thinkin'
How lonesome an' solemn it wuz:
When suddent, I riz in a hurry,
The laurel whipped back I could curse!
Lize could n't git rid o' her worry,
An' woman-like come fer the worse.
Jest then through the gully an' thicket
I seed the sun glim on the stocks
O' their Winchesters. Slim as a picket
Lize stood by me there in the rocks.
We waited until the last came in.
I lined on the leader an' said,
"Shoot!" hoarsely. We ushered the game in
With the sheriff an' deputy dead.
It wuz a surprise for 'em certain!
They saw 't wuz a trap, an' rid back;
But the three in the gap raised a curtain,
With death-dealin' crack upon crack.
An' back to the gully with frighted
Sick faces they galloped, like sin;
An' we, in the rocks, lay an' sighted,
An' hell jest happened agin.
They wuz cornered: they seed it: an' grimly
They turned on their death: an' I leant
With my gun on a rock, an' seed dimly
They rid fer us shootin', hell-bent
Through the smoke fer the thick o' our fire:
Then Lize, who wuz loadin' a gun,
Shrieked somethin' an' jumped an' a wire
O' blood down her face. She wuz done.
There wuz six on 'em left. But a baby
Could of finished me then, with her dead
Instid o' myself! An' it may be
The rest on us there had eat lead
If Bud had n't come with another.
Them three wuz enough fer the rest,
Gittin' off as they did! I would bother
With nothin', her head on my breast.
But they got me away; an' together
Brung her to the cave with the shot
In her face. May the buzzards now feather
And roost on them there where they rot!
Next Morning
by D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Richards)

How have I wandered here to this vaulted room
In the house of life? - the floor was ruffled with gold
Last evening, and she who was softly in bloom,
Glimmered as flowers that in perfume at twilight unfold
For the flush of the night; whereas now the gloom
Of every dirty, must-besprinkled mould,
And damp old web of misery's heirloom
Deadens this day's grey-dropping arras-fold.
And what is this that floats on the undermist
Of the mirror towards the dusty grate, as if feeling
Unsightly its way to the warmth? - this thing with a list
To the left? this ghost like a candle swealing?
Pale-blurred, with two round black drops, as if it missed
Itself among everything else, here hungrily stealing
Upon me! - my own reflection! - explicit gist
Of my presence there in the mirror that leans from the ceiling!
Then will somebody square this shade with the being I know
I was last night, when my soul rang clear as a bell
And happy as rain in summer? Why should it be so?
What is there gone against me, why am I in hell?
Sonnet IV: How Many Bards Gild The Lapses Of Time!
by John Keats

How many bards gild the lapses of time!
A few of them have ever been the food
Of my delighted fancy, I could brood
Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime:
And often, when I sit me down to rhyme,
These will in throngs before my mind intrude:
But no confusion, no disturbance rude
Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime.
So the unnumbered sounds that evening store;
The songs of birds the whispering of the leaves
The voice of waters the great bell that heaves
With solemn sound, and thousand others more,
That distance of recognizance bereaves,
Makes pleasing music, and not wild uproar.