DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
The Drover's Sweetheart
by Henry Lawson

An hour before the sun goes down
Behind the ragged boughs,
I go across the little run
And bring the dusty cows;
And once I used to sit and rest
Beneath the fading dome,
For there was one that I loved best
Who'd bring the cattle home.
Our yard is fixed with double bails,
Round one the grass is green,
The bush is growing through the rails,
The spike is rusted in;
And 'twas from there his freckled face
Would turn and smile at me
He'd milk a dozen in the race
While I was milking three.
I milk eleven cows myself
Where once I milked but four;
I set the dishes on the shelf
And close the dairy door;
And when the glaring sunlight fails
And the fire shines through the cracks,
I climb the broken stockyard rails
And watch the bridle-tracks.
He kissed me twice and once again
And rode across the hill,
The pint-pots and the hobble-chain
I hear them jingling still;
He'll come at night or not at all
He left in dust and heat,
And when the soft, cool shadows fall
Is the best time to meet.
And he is coming back again,
He wrote to let me know,
The floods were in the Darling then
It seems so long ago;
He'd come through miles of slush and mud,
And it was weary work,
The creeks were bankers, and the flood
Was forty miles round Bourke.
He said the floods had formed a block,
The plains could not be crossed,
And there was foot-rot in the flock
And hundreds had been lost;
The sheep were falling thick and fast
A hundred miles from town,
And when he reached the line at last
He trucked the remnant down.
And so he'll have to stand the cost;
His luck was always bad,
Instead of making more, he lost
The money that he had;
And how he'll manage, heaven knows
(My eyes are getting dim),
He says he says he don't suppose
I'll want to marry him.
As if I wouldn't take his hand
Without a golden glove
Oh! Jack, you men won't understand
How much a girl can love.
I long to see his face once more
Jack's dog! thank God, it's Jack!
(I never thought I'd faint before)
He's coming up the track.
An Hour With Thee
by Walter Scott (Sir)

An hour with thee! When earliest day
Dapples with gold the eastern gray,
Oh, what can frame my mind to bear
The toil and turmoil, cark and care,
New griefs, which coming hours unfold,
And sad remembrance of the old?
One hour with thee.
One hour with thee! When burning June
Waves his red flag at pitch of noon;
What shall repay the faithful swain,
His labor on the sultry plain;
And, more than cave or sheltering bough,
Cool feverish blood and throbbing brow?
One hour with thee.
One hour with thee! When sun is set,
Oh, what can teach me to forget
The thankless labors of the day;
The hopes, the wishes, flung away;
The increasing wants, and lessening gains,
The master's pride, who scorns my pains?
One hour with thee
A Pre-Existence.
by Madison Julius Cawein

An intimation of some previous life,
Or dark dream, in the present dim-divined,
Of some uncertain sleep - or lived or dreamed
In some dead life - between a dusk and dawn;
From heathen battles to Toledo's gates,
Far off defined, his corselet and camail,
Damascened armet, shattered; in an eve's
Anger of brass a galloping glitter, one
Rode arrow-wounded. And the city caught
A cry before him and a wail behind,
Of walls beleaguered; battles; conquered kings;
Triumphant Taric; broken Spain and slaves.
And I, a Moslem slave, a miser Jew's,
Housed near the Tagus - squalid and alone
Save for his slave, held dear - to beat and starve - 
Leaner than my lank shadow when the moon,
A burning beacon, westerns; and my bones
A visible hunger; famished with the fear,
Soul-garb of slaves, I bore him - I, who held
Him soul and self, more hated than his God,
Stood silent; fools had laughed; I saw my way.
War-time crops weapons; and the blade I bought
Was subtly pointed. For, I knew his ways:
The nightly nuptials of his jars of gems
And bags of doublas - oh, I knew his ways.
A shadow, woven in the hangings, hid
Till time said now; gaunt from the hangings stole
Behind him; humped and stooping so, his heart
Clove through the faded tunic, murrey-dyed;
Grinned exultation while the grim, slow blood
Drenched black and darkened round the oblong wound,
And his old face thinned grayer than morn's moon.
Rubies from Badakhsh'n in rose lights dripped
Slim tears of poppy-purple crystal; dull,
Red, ember-pregnant, carbuncles wherein
Fevered a captive crimson; bugles wan
Of cat-eyed hyacinths; moon-emeralds
With starry greenness stabbed; in limpid stains
Of liquid lilac, Persian amethysts;
Fire-opals savage and mesmeric with
Voluptuous flame, long, sweet, and sensuous as
Soft eyes of Orient women; sapphires beamed
With talismanic violet, from tombs,
Deev-guarded, of primordial Solimans;
Length-agonized with fire, diamonds of
Golconda - This, a sandaled dervise bare
Seven days, beneath a red Arabian sun,
Seven nights, beneath a round Arabian moon,
Under his tongue; an Emeer's ransom, held
Of some wild tribe.... Bleached in the perishing waste
A Bedouin Arab found sand-strangled bones,
A skeleton, vulture-torn, fierce in whose skull
One blazing eye the diamond. At Aleppo
Bartered, a bauble for his desert love. 
Jacinth and Indian pearl, gem jolting gem,
Flashed, rutilating in the irised light,
A rain of splintered fire; and his head,
Long-haired, white-sunk among them.
Yet I took
All though his eyes burned in them; though, meseemed,
Each several jewel glared a separate curse....
Well! dead men work us mischief from the grave.
Richer than all Castile and yet not dare
Drink but from cups of Roman murra, spar
Bowl-sprayed with fibrile gold! spar sensitive
Of poison! I, no slave, yet all a slave
To fear a dead fool's malice! Still, how else!
Feasting within the music of my halls,
While perfumed beauty danced in sinuous robes,
Diaphanous, more silken than those famed
Of loomed Amorgos or of classic Kos,
Draining the unflawed murrhine, Xeres-brimmed,
Had I reeled poisoned, dying wolfsbane-slain!
The Verdict
by Edgar Lee Masters

"An inquisition taken for the people
Of the State of Illinois here at LeRoy,
County aforesaid, on the 7th of August,
Anna Domini, nineteen hundred nineteen,
Before me, William Merival, coroner
For the said County, viewing here the body
Of Elenor Murray lying dead, upon
The oath of six good lawful men, the same
Of the said County, being duly sworn
To inquire for the said people into all
The circumstances of her death, the said
Elenor Murray, and by whom the same
Was brought about, and in what manner, when,
And where she came to death, do say upon
Their oaths, that Elenor Murray lying dead
In the office of the coroner at LeRoy
Came to her death on August 7th aforesaid
Upon the east shore of the Illinois River
A mile above Starved Rock, from syncope,
While in the company of Barrett Bays,
Who held her in his arms when she was seized,
And should have laid her down when she was seized
To give her heart a chance to resume its beat."
*        *        *        *        *
The jury signed the verdict and arose
And said good-night to Merival, went their way.
Next day the coroner went to Madison
To look on Arielle, who had written him.
A Tempest.
by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

An awful tempest mashed the air,
The clouds were gaunt and few;
A black, as of a spectre's cloak,
Hid heaven and earth from view.
The creatures chuckled on the roofs
And whistled in the air,
And shook their fists and gnashed their teeth.
And swung their frenzied hair.
The morning lit, the birds arose;
The monster's faded eyes
Turned slowly to his native coast,
And peace was Paradise!
Oracabessa
by Paul Cameron Brown

An iron wrought gate of turpentine force conveys little pigment,
almost black parchment letters mindful of
hands, arched and stroked from the very stone, until an
elephantine water runs nettle sand to their granite perch.
The broiling heat in this part of the Indies one knows must,
posthaste, carry to the humus and flies any modicum of human remains.
And, over distant dispatch of time, the elongated sprawl of waves dashing up straight to the shallow's grave, makes
memory drawn, any record of the little parish's dead flimsy
in the topsy context of soil and undulant peat.
A greened isle stares past the feckless scene, past again an
aged church noticeboard that scrapes out traces of news
worthy of import to the wormy road.
Whitewash, the colour of the shackled crypts, casts upon
the church a pallor of distraught gray.
A goat is seen foraging between such marker stones.
The day seems to cut into the marble white detachment
of the sarcophagi with abrupt candor.
Yet, while the cove pokes like a walking stick, the sun &
earth conspire to reclaim this space as their rightful bread.
A huge vegetative urge to growth is witness to abundant
further life - life in whorls of bamboo shoot, naseberry
thatches & canebreak all garnished a short stride across the barrier gate.
Perfect Work
by Joseph Horatio Chant

An artist skilled beyond the sons of men
With pleasure scanned the pictures on the wall,
Rare works of art, each one pronounced a gem,
The product of his hand, both great and small;
Each filled its place in the designer's plan;
Conceived in full before the work began.
Pleased was the artist with results as shown;
But his ideal was not as yet attained;
It needed this, as palace needs a throne,
But throne a king--then is perfection gained,
When his great masterpiece hangs in its place,
And the great artist looks in his own face.
The Soul
by Madison Julius Cawein

An heritage of hopes and fears
And dreams and memory,
And vices of ten thousand years
God gives to thee.
A house of clay, the home of Fate,
Haunted of Love and Sin,
Where Death stands knocking at the gate
To let him in.
The Precocious Baby. A Very True Tale
by William Schwenck Gilbert

(To be sung to the Air of the "Whistling Oyster.")
An elderly person a prophet by trade
With his quips and tips
On withered old lips,
He married a young and a beautiful maid;
The cunning old blade!
Though rather decayed,
He married a beautiful, beautiful maid.
She was only eighteen, and as fair as could be,
With her tempting smiles
And maidenly wiles,
And he was a trifle past seventy-three:
Now what she could see
Is a puzzle to me,
In a prophet of seventy seventy-three!
Of all their acquaintances bidden (or bad)
With their loud high jinks
And underbred winks,
None thought they'd a family have but they had;
A dear little lad
Who drove 'em half mad,
For he turned out a horribly fast little cad.
For when he was born he astonished all by,
With their "Law, dear me!"
"Did ever you see?"
He'd a pipe in his mouth and a glass in his eye,
A hat all awry
An octagon tie
And a miniature miniature glass in his eye.
He grumbled at wearing a frock and a cap,
With his "Oh, dear, oh!"
And his "Hang it! 'oo know!"
And he turned up his nose at his excellent pap
"My friends, it's a tap
Dat is not worf a rap."
(Now this was remarkably excellent pap.)
He'd chuck his nurse under the chin, and he'd say,
With his "Fal, lal, lal"
"'Oo doosed fine gal!"
This shocking precocity drove 'em away:
"A month from to-day
Is as long as I'll stay
Then I'd wish, if you please, for to toddle away."
His father, a simple old gentleman, he
With nursery rhyme
And "Once on a time,"
Would tell him the story of "Little Bo-P,"
"So pretty was she,
So pretty and wee,
As pretty, as pretty, as pretty could be."
But the babe, with a dig that would startle an ox,
With his "C'ck! Oh, my!
Go along wiz 'oo, fie!"
Would exclaim, "I'm afraid 'oo a socking ole fox."
Now a father it shocks,
And it whitens his locks,
When his little babe calls him a shocking old fox.
The name of his father he'd couple and pair
(With his ill-bred laugh,
And insolent chaff)
With those of the nursery heroines rare
Virginia the Fair,
Or Good Goldenhair,
Till the nuisance was more than a prophet could bear.
"There's Jill and White Cat" (said the bold little brat,
With his loud, "Ha, ha!")
"'Oo sly ickle Pa!
Wiz 'oo Beauty, Bo-Peep, and 'oo Mrs. Jack Sprat!
I've noticed 'oo pat
MY pretty White Cat
I sink dear mamma ought to know about dat!"
He early determined to marry and wive,
For better or worse
With his elderly nurse
Which the poor little boy didn't live to contrive:
His hearth didn't thrive
No longer alive,
He died an enfeebled old dotard at five!
MORAL.
Now, elderly men of the bachelor crew,
With wrinkled hose
And spectacled nose,
Don't marry at all you may take it as true
If ever you do
The step you will rue,
For your babes will be elderly elderly too.
An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion
by Yehuda Amichai

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the "Had Gadya" machine.
Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.
Searching for a goat or for a child has always been
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.
Sonet 22
by Michael Drayton

An euill spirit your beauty haunts me still,
Where-with (alas) I haue been long possest,
Which ceaseth not to tempt me vnto ill,
Nor giues me once but one pore minutes rest.
In me it speakes, whether I sleepe or wake,
And when by meanes to driue it out I try,
With greater torments then it me doth take,
And tortures me in most extreamity.
Before my face, it layes all my dispaires,
And hasts me on vnto a suddaine death;
Now tempting me, to drown my selfe in teares,
And then in sighing to giue vp my breath:
Thus am I still prouok'd to euery euill,
By this good wicked spirit, sweet Angel deuill.
The Pastor's Daughter.
by George Pope Morris

An ivy-mantled cottage smiled,
Deep-wooded near a streamlet's side,
Where dwelt the village-pastor's child,
In all her maiden bloom and pride.
Proud suitors paid their court and duty
To this romantic sylvan beauty:
Yet none of all the swains who sought her,
Was worthy of the pastor's daughter.
The town-gallants crossed hill and plain,
To seek the groves of her retreat;
And many followed in her train,
To lay their riches at her feet.
But still, for all their arts so wary,
From home they could not lure the fairy.
A maid without a heart they thought her,
And so they left the pastor's daughter.
One balmy eve in dewy spring
A bard became her father's guest:
He struck his harp, and every string
To love vibrated in her breast.
With that true faith which can not falter,
Her hand was given at the alter,
And faithful was the heart he brought her
To wedlock and the pastor's daughter.
How seldom learn the worldly gay
With all their sophistry and art,
The sweet and gentle primrose-way
To woman's fond, devoted heart!
They seek, but never find, the treasure
Revealed in eyes of jet and azure.
To them, like truth in wells of water,
A fable is the pastor's daughter.
Drink.
by Lennox Amott

I.
An English village, a summer scene,
A homely cottage, a garden green,
An opening vista, a cloudless sky,
A bee that hums as it passes by;
A babe that chuckles among the flowers,
A smile that enlivens the mid-day hours,
A wife that is fair as the sunny day,
A peace that the world cannot take away,
A hope that is humble and daily bread,
A thankful soul that is comforted,
A cosy cot and a slumbering child,
A life and a love that are undefiled,
A thought that is silent, an earnest prayer,
The noiseless step of a phantom there!
II.
A drunken husband, a wailing wife;
Oh, a weary way is the way of life!
A heartless threat and a cruel blow
And grief that the world can never know;
A tongue obscene and a will perverse,
A horrid oath and a muttered curse,
A winter drear and a scanty meal,
A heart so hard, oh, a heart of steel!
A wizened look and an infant's cry,
The cold, cold clutch of Poverty,
A withered hand and a blanch'd cheek,
Alone, and, ah, no friend to seek!
A chilly hearth and a ragged dress,
A home that is all heaviness!
III.
A grim grey court in a City's gloom,
A frantic fear of eternal doom,
A wretch besotted and depraved
And cries that cursed the curse they craved,
Pollution all, no light! no light!
"Oh, where shall be my drink, to-night!"
A wretched garret, a straw-strewn bed,
A husband stretched in a corner--dead.
A shriek of anguish, a choking sigh,
"Oh let me perish, let me die!"
An agony of dire despair,
A picture of torn and dishevelled hair,
And none to succour, none to save,
A pauper's hearse and an early grave.
A voiceless widow, a wringing of hands,
A long, long wish for some far off sands,
A staring eye and a vacant mood,
"Oh Father, teach me to be good"
A strengthless effort, a feverish start,
A prostrate form and--a broken heart.
IV.
A dismal eve and a howling dog,
A ghostly silence, a river fog,
A byway deserted, a dingy street,
A glimmer to light life's feeble feet.
A trembling step and a beaded brow,
"Oh where, oh where, shall I hasten now?"
No eye hath seen nor ever shall,
On, on in the gloom, to the still canal;
Hush, hush, a murmur--a fearful pause--
A footfall--oh horror; a slam of doors--
A sinking down to former repose,
"Oh darkness come and end my woes."
Away like a phantom, down far to the East,
"Oh when shall the weary and sad be released?"
An alley, a prayer, a soundless wharf,
A biting wind and a graveyard cough,
A heap of rags and a starving child,
Alas, alas for the undefiled!
A heavy tide and a moon obscured,
A shapeless mass of barges moored,
Nor light, nor sound and a flood that gapes,
A frowning pile of horrid shapes.
All darkness, blackness, deep despair,
"My burden is greater than I can bear!"
A rolling river, the dead of night,
A form all palsied with affright,
Alone, yes, alone, yet so afraid,
A hurried stride from that inky shade;
On over the barges away from the shore,
One breathless clasp, one long clasp more--
A heavy plunge and a gurgling groan,
Two clammy corpses cold as stone,
A brow distorted, a clench'd fist,
A babe the Lord Himself has kissed.
The Station-Master of Lone Prairie
by Bret Harte (Francis)

An empty bench, a sky of grayest etching,
A bare, bleak shed in blackest silhouette,
Twelve years of platform, and before them stretching
Twelve miles of prairie glimmering through the wet.
North, south, east, west, the same dull gray persistence,
The tattered vapors of a vanished train,
The narrowing rails that meet to pierce the distance,
Or break the columns of the far-off rain.
Naught but myself; nor form nor figure breaking
The long hushed level and stark shining waste;
Nothing that moves to fill the vision aching,
When the last shadow fled in sullen haste.
Nothing beyond. Ah yes! From out the station
A stiff, gaunt figure thrown against the sky,
Beckoning me with some wooden salutation
Caught from his signals as the train flashed by;
Yielding me place beside him with dumb gesture
Born of that reticence of sky and air.
We sit apart, yet wrapped in that one vesture
Of silence, sadness, and unspoken care:
Each following his own thought, around us darkening
The rain-washed boundaries and stretching track,
Each following those dim parallels and hearkening
For long-lost voices that will not come back.
Until, unasked, I knew not why or wherefore,
He yielded, bit by bit, his dreary past,
Like gathered clouds that seemed to thicken there for
Some dull down-dropping of their care at last.
Long had he lived there. As a boy had started
From the stacked corn the Indian's painted face;
Heard the wolves' howl the wearying waste that parted
His father's hut from the last camping-place.
Nature had mocked him: thrice had claimed the reaping,
With scythe of fire, of lands she once had sown;
Sent the tornado, round his hearthstone heaping
Rafters, dead faces that were like his own.
Then came the War Time. When its shadow beckoned
He had walked dumbly where the flag had led
Through swamp and fen, unknown, unpraised, unreckoned,
To famine, fever, and a prison bed.
Till the storm passed, and the slow tide returning
Cast him, a wreck, beneath his native sky;
Here, at his watch, gave him the chance of earning
Scant means to live who won the right to die.
All this I heard or seemed to hear half blending
With the low murmur of the coming breeze,
The call of some lost bird, and the unending
And tireless sobbing of those grassy seas.
Until at last the spell of desolation
Broke with a trembling star and far-off cry.
The coming train! I glanced around the station,
All was as empty as the upper sky!
Naught but myself; nor form nor figure waking
The long hushed level and stark shining waste;
Naught but myself, that cry, and the dull shaking
Of wheel and axle, stopped in breathless haste!
'Now, then look sharp! Eh, what? The Station-Master?
Thar's none! We stopped here of our own accord.
The man got killed in that down-train disaster
This time last evening. Right there! All aboard!'
The Wood Water
by Madison Julius Cawein

An evil, stealthy water, dark as hate,
Sunk from the light of day,
'Thwart which is hung a ruined water-gate,
Creeps on its stagnant way.
Moss and the spawny duckweed, dim as air,
And green as copperas,
Choke its dull current; and, like hideous hair,
Tangles of twisted grass.
Above it sinister trees, as crouched and gaunt
As huddled Terror, lean;
Guarding some secret in that nightmare haunt,
Some horror they have seen.
Something the sunset points at from afar,
Spearing the sullen wood
And hag-gray water with a single bar
Of flame as red as blood.
Something the stars, conspiring with the moon,
Shall look on, and remain
Frozen with fear; staring as in a swoon,
Striving to flee in vain.
Something the wisp that, wandering in the night,
Above the ghastly stream,
Haply shall find; and, filled with frantic fright,
Light with its ghostly gleam.
Something that lies there, under weed and ooze,
With wide and awful eyes
And matted hair, and limbs the waters bruise,
That strives, yet can not rise.