DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
The Undertaker's Horse
by Rudyard Kipling

"To-tschin-shu is condemned to death.
How can he drink tea with the Executioner?"
Japanese Proverb.
The eldest son bestrides him,
And the pretty daughter rides him,
And I meet him oft o' mornings on the Course;
And there kindles in my bosom
An emotion chill and gruesome
As I canter past the Undertaker's Horse.
Neither shies he nor is restive,
But a hideously suggestive
Trot, professional and placid, he affects;
And the cadence of his hoof-beats
To my mind this grim reproof beats:,
"Mend your pace, my friend, I'm coming. Who's the next?"
Ah! stud-bred of ill-omen,
I have watched the strongest go,    men
Of pith and might and muscle,    at your heels,
Down the plantain-bordered highway,
(Heaven send it ne'er be my way!)
In a lacquered box and jetty upon wheels.
Answer, sombre beast and dreary,
Where is Brown, the young, the cheery,
Smith, the pride of all his friends and half the Force?
You were at that last dread dak
We must cover at a walk,
Bring them back to me, O Undertaker's Horse!
With your mane unhogged and flowing,
And your curious way of going,
And that businesslike black crimping of your tail,
E'en with Beauty on your back, Sir,
Pacing as a lady's hack, Sir,
What wonder when I meet you I turn pale?
It may be you wait your time, Beast,
Till I write my last bad rhyme, Beast,
Quit the sunlight, cut the rhyming, drop the glass,
Follow after with the others,
Where some dusky heathen smothers
Us with marigolds in lieu of English grass.
Or, perchance, in years to follow,
I shall watch your plump sides hollow,
See Carnifex (gone lame) become a corse,
See old age at last o'erpower you,
And the Station Pack devour you,
I shall chuckle then, O Undertaker's Horse!
But to insult, jibe, and quest, I've
Still the hideously suggestive
Trot that hammers out the unrelenting text,
And I hear it hard behind me
In what place soe'er I find me:,
"'Sure to catch you sooner or later. Who's the next?"
The "Stay-At-Home's" P'an.
by George Augustus Baker, Jr.

The evenings are damper and colder;
The maples and sumacs are red,
The wild Equinoctial is coming,
The flowers in the garden are dead.
The steamers are all overflowing,
The railroads are all loaded down,
And the beauties we've sighed for all Summer
Are hurrying back into town.
They come from the banks of the Hudson,
From the sands of the Branch, and Cape May,
From the parlors of bright Saratoga,
From the dash of Niagara's spray.
From misty, sea-salt Narragansett,
From Mahopac's magical lake.
They come on their way to new conquests,
They're longing for more hearts to break.
E'en Newport is dull and deserted 
Its billowy beaches no more
Made bright with sweet, ocean-kissed faces,
Love's beacon lights set on the shore.
The rugged White Hills of New Hampshire,
The last of their lovers have seen,
The echoes are left to their slumbers,
No dainty feet thread the ravine.
On West Point's delightful parade ground
Sighs many a hapless cadet,
Who's basked through the long days of Summer
In the smiles of a city coquette;
And now the incipient hero
Beholds his enchantress depart,
With the spoils of her lightly-won triumph,
His buttons, as well as his heart.
Come, dry your eyes, Grandmother Nature,
They care not a whit for your woe;
The city is calling her daughters 
We can't spare them longer, they know 
Our beautiful, tender-voiced darlings,
With the blue of the deep Summer skies,
And the glow of the bright Summer sunshine,
Entrapped in their mischievous eyes.
We know their expenses are awful,
That horror unspeakable fills
The souls of unfortunate fathers
Who foot up their dressmaker's bills.
That they'd barter their souls for French candy;
That diamonds ruin their peace;
That they rave over middle-aged actors,
And in other respects are well, geese.
We laugh at them, boys, but we love them,
For under their nonsense we know
They've hearts that are honest and loving,
And souls that are whiter than snow.
So out with that bottle of Roederer!
Large glasses, boys! Up goes the cork!
All charged? To the belles of creation,
The glorious girls of New York.
The Sonnets Of Tommaso Campanella - God Made And God Rules.
by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

La fabbrica del mondo.
The fabric of the world--earth, air, and skies--
Each particle thereof and tiniest part
Designed for special ends--proclaims the art
Of an almighty Maker good and wise.
Nathless the lawless brutes, our crimes and lies,
The joys of vicious men, the good man's smart,
All creatures swerving from their ends, impart
Doubts that the Ruler is nor good nor wise.
Can it then be that boundless Power, Love, Mind,
Lets others reign, the while He takes repose?
Hath He grown old, or hath He ceased to heed?
Nay, one God made and rules: He shall unwind
The tangled skein; the hidden law disclose,
Whereby so many sinned in thought and deed.
At School-Close
by John Greenleaf Whittier

Bowdoin Street, Boston, 1877.
The end has come, as come it must
To all things; in these sweet June days
The teacher and the scholar trust
Their parting feet to separate ways.
They part: but in the years to be
Shall pleasant memories cling to each,
As shells bear inland from the sea
The murmur of the rhythmic beach.
One knew the joy the sculptor knows
When, plastic to his lightest touch,
His clay-wrought model slowly grows
To that fine grace desired so much.
So daily grew before her eyes
The living shapes whereon she wrought,
Strong, tender, innocently wise,
The child's heart with the woman's thought.
And one shall never quite forget
The voice that called from dream and play,
The firm but kindly hand that set
Her feet in learning's pleasant way,
The joy of Undine soul-possessed,
The wakening sense, the strange delight
That swelled the fabled statue's breast
And filled its clouded eyes with sight.
O Youth and Beauty, loved of all!
Ye pass from girlhood's gate of dreams;
In broader ways your footsteps fall,
Ye test the truth of all that seams.
Her little realm the teacher leaves,
She breaks her wand of power apart,
While, for your love and trust, she gives
The warm thanks of a grateful heart.
Hers is the sober summer noon
Contrasted with your morn of spring,
The waning with the waxing moon,
The folded with the outspread wing.
Across the distance of the years
She sends her God-speed back to you;
She has no thought of doubts or fears
Be but yourselves, be pure, be true,
And prompt in duty; heed the deep,
Low voice of conscience; through the ill
And discord round about you, keep
Your faith in human nature still.
Be gentle: unto griefs and needs,
Be pitiful as woman should,
And, spite of all the lies of creeds,
Hold fast the truth that God is good.
Give and receive; go forth and bless
The world that needs the hand and heart
Of Martha's helpful carefulness
No less than Mary's better part.
So shall the stream of time flow by
And leave each year a richer good,
And matron loveliness outvie
The nameless charm of maidenhood.
And, when the world shall link your names
With gracious lives and manners fine,
The teacher shall assert her claims,
And proudly whisper, "These were mine!
Elphin.
by Madison Julius Cawein

The eve was a burning copper,
The night was a boundless black
Where wells of the lightning crumbled
And boiled with blazing rack,
When I came to the coal-black castle
With the wild rain on my back.
Thrice under its goblin towers,
Where the causey of rock was laid,
Thrice, there at its spider portal,
My scornful bugle brayed,
But never a warder questioned, - 
An owl's was the answer made.
When the heaven above was blistered
One scald of blinding storm,
And the blackness clanged like a cavern
Of iron where demons swarm,
I rode in the court of the castle
With the shield upon my arm.
My sword unsheathed and certain
Of the visor of my casque,
My steel steps challenged the donjon
My gauntlet should unmask;
But never a knight or varlet
To stay or slay or ask.
My heels on the stone ground iron,
My fists on the bolts clashed steel; - 
In the hall, the roar of the torrent,
In the turret, the thunder's peal; - 
And I found her there in the turret
Alone by her spinning-wheel.
She spun the flax of a spindle,
And I wondered on her face;
She spun the flax of a spindle,
And I marvelled on her grace;
She spun the flax of a spindle,
And I watched a little space.
But nerves of my manhood weakened;
The heart in my breast was wax;
Myself but the hide of an image
Out-stuffed with the hards of flax: - 
She spun and she smiled a-spinning
A spindle of blood-red flax.
She spun and she laughed a-spinning
The blood of my veins in a skein;
But I knew how the charm was mastered,
And snapped in the hissing vein;
So she wove but a fiery scorpion
That writhed from her hands again....
Fleeing in rain and in tempest,
Saw by the cataract's bed, - 
Cancers of ulcerous fire,
Wounds of a bloody red, - 
Its windows glare in the darkness
Eyes of a dragon's head.
The Shepherd and the Lion.
by Jean de La Fontaine

The Fable 'sop tells is nearly this: - 
A shepherd from his flock began to miss,
And long'd to catch the stealer of, his sheep.
Before a cavern, dark and deep,
Where wolves retired by day to sleep,
Which he suspected as the thieves,
He set his trap among the leaves;
And, ere he left the place,
He thus invoked celestial grace: - 
"O king of all the powers divine,
Against the rogue but grant me this delight,
That this my trap may catch him in my sight,
And I, from twenty calves of mine,
Will make the fattest thine."
But while the words were on his tongue,
Forth came a lion great and strong.
Down crouch'd the man of sheep, and said,
With shivering fright half dead,
"Alas! that man should never be aware
Of what may be the meaning of his prayer!
To catch the robber of my flocks,
O king of gods, I pledged a calf to thee:
If from his clutches thou wilt rescue me,
I'll raise my offering to an ox."
Bacchanalia
by Matthew Arnold

The evening comes, the fields are still.
The tinkle of the thirsty rill,
Unheard all day, ascends again;
Deserted is the half-mown plain,
Silent the swaths! the ringing wain,
The mower's cry, the dog's alarms,
All housed within the sleeping farms!
The business of the day is done,
The last-left haymaker is gone.
And from the thyme upon the height,
And from the elder-blossom white
And pale dog-roses in the hedge,
And from the mint-plant in the sedge,
In puffs of balm the night-air blows
The perfume which the day forgoes.
And on the pure horizon far,
See, pulsing with the first-born star,
The liquid sky above the hill!
The evening comes, the fields are still.
Quick And Bitter
by Yehuda Amichai

The end was quick and bitter.
Slow and sweet was the time between us,
slow and sweet were the nights
when my hands did not touch one another in despair but in the love
of your body which came between them.
And when I entered into you
it seemed then that great happiness
could be measured with precision
of sharp pain. Quick and bitter.
Slow and sweet were the nights.
Now is bitter and grinding as sand,
"Let's be sensible" and similar curses.
And as we stray further from love
we multiply the words,
words and sentences so long and orderly.
Had we remained together
we could have become a silence.
The Enthusiastic Elephant,
by Edward Lear

The Enthusiastic Elephant,
who ferried himself across the water with the
Kitchen Poker and a New pair of Ear-rings.
A Song Of Liberty
by William Blake

The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth:
Albions coast is sick silent; the American meadows faint!
Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers and mutter across the ocean! France rend down thy dungeon;
Golden Spain burst the barriers of old Rome;
Cast thy keys O Rome into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling,
And weep!
In her trembling hands she took the new, born terror howling;
On those infinite mountains of light now barr'd out by the atlantic sea, the new born fire stood before the starry king!
Flag'd with grey brow'd snows and thunderous visages the jealous wings wav'd over the deep.
The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield, forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and
[PL 26]hurl'd the new born wonder thro' the starry night.
The fire, the fire, is falling!
Look up! look up! O citizen of London. enlarge thy countenance; O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and
wine; O African! black African! (go. winged thought widen his forehead.)
The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.
Wak'd from his eternal sleep, the hoary, element roaring fled away:
Down rushd beating his wings in vain the jealous king: his grey brow'd councellors, thunderous warriors, curl'd veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots horses, elephants: banners, castles, slings and rocks,
Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona's dens.
All night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded emerge round the gloomy king,
With thunder and fire: leading his starry hosts thro' the waste wilderness [PL 27]he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay,
Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast,
Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying
Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.
Chorus
Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren whom, tyrant, he calls free; lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not!
For every thing that lives is Holy
The Excellent Double-extra XX
by Edward Lear

The Excellent Double-extra XX
imbibing King Xerxes, who lived a
long while ago.
To Laura In Death. Sonnet XXIV.
by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)

Gli occhi di ch' io parlai s' caldamente.
HIS LYRE IS NOW ATTUNED ONLY TO WOE.
The eyes, the face, the limbs of heavenly mould,
So long the theme of my impassion'd lay,
Charms which so stole me from myself away,
That strange to other men the course I hold;
The crisp'd locks of pure and lucid gold,
The lightning of the angelic smile, whose ray
To earth could all of paradise convey,
A little dust are now!--to feeling cold!
And yet I live!--but that I live bewail,
Sunk the loved light that through the tempest led
My shatter'd bark, bereft of mast and sail:
Hush'd be for aye the song that breathed love's fire!
Lost is the theme on which my fancy fed,
And turn'd to mourning my once tuneful lyre.
DACRE.
The eyes, the arms, the hands, the feet, the face,
Which made my thoughts and words so warm and wild,
That I was almost from myself exiled,
And render'd strange to all the human race;
The lucid locks that curl'd in golden grace,
The lightening beam that, when my angel smiled,
Diffused o'er earth an Eden heavenly mild;
What are they now? Dust, lifeless dust, alas!
And I live on, a melancholy slave,
Toss'd by the tempest in a shatter'd bark,
Reft of the lovely light that cheer'd the wave.
The flame of genius, too, extinct and dark,
Here let my lays of love conclusion have;
Mute be the lyre: tears best my sorrows mark.
MOREHEAD.
Those eyes whose living lustre shed the heat
Of bright meridian day; the heavenly mould
Of that angelic form; the hands, the feet,
The taper arms, the crisp'd locks of gold;
Charms that the sweets of paradise enfold;
The radiant lightning of her angel-smile,
And every grace that could the sense beguile
Are now a pile of ashes, deadly cold!
And yet I bear to drag this cumbrous chain,
That weighs my soul to earth--to bliss or pain
Alike insensible:--her anchor lost,
The frail dismantled bark, all tempest-toss'd,
Surveys no port of comfort--closed the scene
Of life's delusive joys;--and dry the Muse's vein.
WOODHOUSELEE.
Those eyes, sweet subject of my rapturous strain!
The arms, the hands, the feet, that lovely face,
By which I from myself divided was,
And parted from the vulgar and the vain;
Those crisp'd locks, pure gold unknown to stain!
Of that angelic smile the lightening grace,
Which wont to make this earth a heavenly place!
Dissolved to senseless ashes now remain!
And yet I live, to endless grief a prey,
'Reft of that star, my loved, my certain guide,
Disarm'd my bark, while tempests round me blow!
Stop, then, my verse--dry is the fountain's tide.
That fed my genius! Cease, my amorous lay!
Changed is my lyre, attuned to endless woe!
CHARLEMONT.
To Giorgio Vasari. Vanity Of Vanities.
by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

Le favole del mondo.
The fables of the world have filched away
The time I had for thinking upon God;
His grace lies buried 'neath oblivion's sod,
Whence springs an evil crop of sins alway.
What makes another wise, leads me astray,
Slow to discern the bad path I have trod:
Hope fades; but still desire ascends that God
May free me from self-love, my sure decay.
Shorten half-way my road to heaven from earth!
Dear Lord, I cannot even half-way rise,
Unless Thou help me on this pilgrimage.
Teach me to hate the world so little worth,
And all the lovely things I clasp and prize;
That endless life, ere death, may be my wage.
Sonnet. About Jesus. XI.
by George MacDonald

The eye was shut in men; the hearing ear
Dull unto deafness; nought but earthly things
Had credence; and no highest art that flings
A spirit radiance from it, like the spear
Of the ice-pointed mountain, lifted clear
In the nigh sunrise, had made skyey springs
Of light in the clouds of dull imaginings:
Vain were the painter or the sculptor here.
Give man the listening heart, the seeing eye;
Give life; let sea-derived fountain well,
Within his spirit, infant waves, to tell
Of the far ocean-mysteries that lie
Silent upon the horizon,--evermore
Falling in voices on the human shore.
Inscriptions In The Ground Of Coleorton, The Seat Of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., Leicestershire
by William Wordsworth

The embowering rose, the acacia, and the pine,
Will not unwillingly their place resign;
If but the Cedar thrive that near them stands,
Planted by Beaumont's and by 's hands.
One wooed the silent Art with studious pains:
These groves have heard the Other's pensive strains;
Devoted thus, their spirits did unite
By interchange of knowledge and delight.
May Nature's kindliest powers sustain the Tree,
And Love protect it from all injury!
And when its potent branches, wide out-thrown,
Darken the brow of this memorial Stone,
Here may some Painter sit in future days,
Some future Poet meditate his lays;
Not mindless of that distant age renowned
When Inspiration hovered o'er this ground,
The haunt of him who sang how spear and shield
In civil conflict met on Bosworth-field;
And of that famous Youth, full soon removed
From earth, perhaps by Shakspeare's self approved,
Fletcher's Associate, Jonson's Friend beloved.
The Summer Shower.
by Lennox Amott

The eve is still and silent and above the tinted plain
The passing clouds are driving gentle showers of summer rain,
And the scent of hay-strewn meadows and the fresh-besprinkled ground
Is mingling with the perfume of the flowers that bloom around.
Off I wander and I stroke the gleeful spaniel at my side,
And, delighted with each other, do we ramble far and wide,
While a ditty is the tribute to the joy that gives it birth,
And the leaves, refreshed, are pouring their cool nectar to the earth.
Oh let me gaze again upon the moisture-laden sky,
Let me see the rolling masses, let me hear the plover's cry,
While enveloping the distant mountain-summits like a shroud,
Like a head bent down and hoary, hangs a heavy wreath of cloud.
Let me gaze upon the sunshine as it breaks upon the mist,
As it bathes the stony mountains that the clouds have lately kissed,
As it tips the dripping leaflet with a scintillating gem,
Like the far-resplendent treasure in a monarch's diadem.
Let me tread the shining pasture-lands, the greenest of the green,
Let me quaff the luscious perfume of the smiling, glistering scene,
While beautified and golden stands the ripe and waving grain,
And all Nature sings for gladness now that sunshine follows rain.
Fortress Snow
by Paul Cameron Brown

The embankment lies as heavy
edges on our lives.
The shadows of the rock,
piled drifts huge monotony's ledge,
accumulations by the side of the tree
wear thin visages;
the breath of summer eclipsed.
Snow reigns supreme;
teeters about the rim
of the city's existence.
Pettiness of man's realm - pretty
foliage of the transient,
wrappings upon our lives
brittle near the storm.
The reply of the eternal,
fire on stone
blazons reality
the peaked remains
of snow streaked sun.
Immensity governs us;
clarity of the temporal
fire set by the staccato
of man's rhythm.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets - Part III. - XLI - New Churchyard
by William Wordsworth

The encircling ground, in native turf arrayed,
Is now by solemn consecration given
To social interests, and to favouring Heaven;
And where the rugged colts their gambols played,
And wild deer bounded through the forest glade,
Unchecked as when by merry Outlaw driven,
Shall hymns of praise resound at morn and even;
And soon, full soon, the lonely Sexton's spade
Shall wound the tender sod. Encincture small,
But infinite its grasp of weal and woe!
Hopes, fears, in never-ending ebb and flow;
The spousal trembling, and the "dust to dust,"
The prayers, the contrite struggle, and the trust
That to the Almighty Father looks through all.
The Father.
by Muriel Stuart

The evening found us whom the day had fled,
Once more in bitter anger, you and I,
Over some small, some foolish, trivial thing
Our anger would not decently let die.
But dragged between us, shamed and shivering,
Until each other's taunts we scarcely heard,
Until we lost the sense of all we said,
And knew not who first spoke the fatal word.
It seemed that even every kiss we wrung
We killed at birth with shuddering and hate,
As if we feared a thing too passionate.
However close we clung
One hour, the next hour found us separate,
Estranged, and Love most bitter on our tongue.
To-night we quarrelled over one small head,
Our fruit of last year's maying, the white bud
Blown from our stormy kisses and the dead
First rapture of our wild, estranging blood.
You clutched him: there was panther in your eyes,
We breathed like beasts in thickets; on the wall
Our shadows swelled as in huge tyrannies,
The room grew dark with anger, yet through all
The shame and hurt and pity of it you were
Still strangely and imperishably dear,
As one who loves the wild day none the less
That turns to naught the lilac's miracle,
Breaking the unrecapturable spell
Of the first may-tree, magic and mystery
Utterly scattering of earth and sky.
Making even the rose's loveliness
A thing for pain to be remembered by.
I said: "My son shall wear his father's sword."
You said: "Shall hands once blossoms at my breast
Be stained with blood?"    I answered with a word
More bitter, and your own, the bitterest,
Stung me to sullen anger, and I said:
"My son shall be no coward of his line
Because his mother choose"; you turned your head,
And your eyes grew implacable on mine.
And like a trodden snake you turned to meet
The foe with sudden hissing ... then you smiled
And broke our life in pieces at my feet,
"Your child?" you said.    "_Your_ child?" ...