DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
Easter
by William Butler Yeats

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse,
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The Night-Wind
by Madison Julius Cawein

I.
I have heard the wind on a winter's night,
When the snow-cold moon looked icily through
My window's flickering firelight,
Where the frost his witchery drew:
I have heard the wind on a winter's night,
Wandering ways that were frozen white,
Wail in my chimney-flue:
And its voice was the voice, so it seemed to me,
The voice of the world's vast misery.
II.
I have heard the wind on a night of spring,
When the leaves unclasped their girdles of gold,
And the bird on the bough sang slumbering,
In the lilac's fragrant fold:
I have heard the wind on a night of spring,
Shaking the musk from its dewy wing,
Sigh in my garden old:
And it seemed that it said, as it sighed above,
"I am the voice of the Earth's great love."
III.
I have heard the wind on a night of fall,
When a devil's-dance was the rain's down pour,
And the wild woods reeled to its demon call,
And the carpet fluttered the floor:
I have heard the wind on a night of fall,
Heaping the leaves by the garden wall,
Weep at my close-shut door:
And its voice, so it seemed, as it sorrowed there,
Was the old, old voice of the world's despair.
IV.
I have heard the wind on a summer night,
When the myriad stars stormed heaven with fire,
And the moon-moth glimmered in phantom flight,
And the crickets creaked in choir:
I have heard the wind on a summer night,
Rocking the red rose and the white,
Murmur in bloom and brier:
And its voice was the voice, so it seemed to me,
Of Earth's primordial mystery.
A Song For Two
by Edward Powys Mathers (As Translator)

I have lacquered my teeth to find a husband.
And I have need of a wife.
Give me a kiss and they will marry us
At Mo-Lao, my village.
I will marry you if you will wait for me,
Wait till the banana puts forth branches,
And fruit hangs heavy on the Sung-tree,
And the onion flowers;
Wait till the dove goes down in the pool to lay her eggs,
And the eel climbs into a tree to make her nest.
Song of Annam.
After The Fashion Of An Old Emblem.
by George MacDonald

I have long enough been working down in my cellar,
Working spade and pick, boring-chisel and drill;
I long for wider spaces, airy, clear-dark, and stellar:
Successless labour never the love of it did fill.
More profit surely lies in a holy, pure quiescence,
In a setting forth of cups to catch the heavenly rain,
In a yielding of the being to the ever waiting presence,
In a lifting of the eyes upward, homeward again!
Up to my garret, its storm-windows and skylights!
There I'll lay me on the floor, and patient let the sun,
The moon and the stars, the blueness and the twilights
Do what their pleasure is, and wait till they have done.
But, lo, I hear a waving on the roof of great pinions!
'Tis the labour of a windmill, broad-spreading to the wind!
Lo, down there goes a. shaft through all the house-dominions!
I trace it to a cellar, whose door I cannot find.
But there I hear ever a keen diamond-drill in motion,
Now fast and now slow as the wind sits in the sails,
Drilling and boring to the far eternal ocean,
The living well of all wells whose water never fails.
So now I go no more to the cellar to my labour,
But up to my garret where those arms are ever going;
There the sky is ever o'er me, and the wind my blessed neighbour,
And the prayer-handle ready turns the sails to its blowing.
Blow, blow, my blessed wind; oh, keep ever blowing!
Keep the great windmill going full and free;
So shall the diamond-drill down below keep going
Till in burst the waters of God's eternal sea.
Riches
by Sara Teasdale

I have no riches but my thoughts,
Yet these are wealth enough for me;
My thoughts of you are golden coins
Stamped in the mint of memory;
And I must spend them all in song,
For thoughts, as well as gold, must be
Left on the hither side of death
To gain their immortality.
Lapis Lazuli
by William Butler Yeats

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow.
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out.
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.
All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
On their own feet they came, or On shipboard,'
Camel-back; horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
Infant Joy
by William Blake

"I have no name;
I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am,
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy, but two days old.
Sweet Joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while;
Sweet joy befall thee!
Bewitched
by Walter De La Mare

,,
Lissom and jimp and slim,
Calling me - calling me over the heather,
'Neath the beech boughs dusk and dim.
I have followed a lady this night,
Followed her far and lone,
Fox and adder and weasel know
The ways that we have gone.
I sit at my supper 'mid honest faces,
And crumble my crust and say
Naught in the long-drawn drawl of the voices
Talking the hours away.
I'll go to my chamber under the gable,
And the moon will lift her light
In at my lattice from over the moorland
Hollow and still and bright.
And I know she will shine on a lady of witchcraft,
Gladness and grief to see,
Who has taken my heart with her nimble fingers,
Calls in my dreams to me;
Who has led me a dance by dell and dingle
My human soul to win,
Made me a changeling to my own, own mother,
A stranger to my kin.
To Sir George Parry, Doctor Of The Civil Law.
by Robert Herrick

I have my laurel chaplet on my head
If, 'mongst these many numbers to be read,
But one by you be hugg'd and cherished.
Peruse my measures thoroughly, and where
Your judgment finds a guilty poem, there
Be you a judge; but not a judge severe.
The mean pass by, or over, none contemn;
The good applaud; the peccant less condemn,
Since absolution you can give to them.
Stand forth, brave man, here to the public sight;
And in my book now claim a twofold right:
The first as doctor, and the last as knight.
I Have Never Loved You Yet
by John Frederick Freeman

I have never loved you yet, if now I love.
If Love was born in that bright April sky
And ran unheeding when the sun was high,
And slept as the moon sleeps through Autumn nights
While those dear steady stars burn in their heights:
If Love so lived and ran and slept and woke
And ran in beauty when each morning broke,
Love yet was boylike, fervid and unstable,
Teased with romance, not knowing truth from fable.
But Winter after Autumn comes and stills
The petulant waters and the wild mind fills
With silence; and the dark and cold are bitter,
O, bitter to remember past days sweeter.
Then Spring with one warm cloudy finger breaks
The frost and the heart's airless black soil shakes;
Love grown a man uprises, serious, bright
With mind remembering now things dark and light.
O, if young Love was beautiful, Love grown old
Experienced and grave is not grown cold.
Life's faithful fire in Love's heart burns the clearer
With all that was, is and draws darkling nearer.
I have never loved you yet, if now I love.
The Dream Of Dread.
by Madison Julius Cawein

I have lain for an hour or twain
Awake, and the tempest is beating
On the roof, and the sleet on the pane,
And the winds are three enemies meeting;
And I listen and hear it again,
My name, in the silence, repeating.
Then dumbness of death that must slay,
Till the midnight is burst like a bubble;
And out of the darkness a ray
'T is she! the all beautiful double;
With a face like the breaking of day,
Eyes dark with the magic of trouble.
I move not; she lies with her lips
At mine; and I feel she is drawing
My life from my heart to their tips,
My heart where the horror is gnawing;
My life in a thousand slow sips,
My flesh with her sorcery awing.
She binds me with merciless eyes;
She drinks of my blood, and I hear it
Drain up with a shudder and rise
To the lips, like the serpent's, that steer it
And she lies and she laughs as she lies,
Saying, "Lo, thy affinitized spirit!"
Then I hear, as if torturing swords
Had shivered and torments had grated
Hoarse iron deep under; and words
As of sins that howled out and awaited
A fiend who lashed into their hords,
And a demon who lacerated.
And I shriek and lie clammy and stark,
As the curse of a devil mounts higher,
Up, out of damnation and dark,
Up, a hobble of hoofs that is dire;
I feel that his mouth is a spark,
His features, of filth and of fire.
"To thy body's corruption, thy grave!
Thy hell! from which thou hast stolen!"
And a blackness rolls down like a wave
With a clamor of tongues that are swollen
And I feel that my flesh is the slave
Of a vampire, diakka, eidolon?
Sonnet--The Poet To Nature
by Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell

I have no secrets from thee, lyre sublime,
My lyre whereof I make my melody.
I sing one way like the west wind through thee,
With my whole heart, and hear thy sweet strings chime.
But thou, who soundest in my tune and rhyme,
Hast tones I wake not, in thy land and sea,
Loveliness not for me, secrets from me,
Thoughts for another, and another time.
And as, the west wind passed, the south wind alters
His intimate sweet things, his hues of noon,
The voices of his waves, sound of his pine,
The meanings of his lost heart,--this thought falters
In my short song--'Another bard shall tune
Thee, my one Lyre, to other songs than mine.'
I Have Lived With Shades
by Thomas Hardy

I
I have lived with shades so long,
And talked to them so oft,
Since forth from cot and croft
I went mankind among,
That sometimes they
In their dim style
Will pause awhile
To hear my say;
II
And take me by the hand,
And lead me through their rooms
In the To-be, where Dooms
Half-wove and shapeless stand:
And show from there
The dwindled dust
And rot and rust
Of things that were.
III
"Now turn," spake they to me
One day: "Look whence we came,
And signify his name
Who gazes thence at thee." -
- "Nor name nor race
Know I, or can,"
I said, "Of man
So commonplace.
IV
"He moves me not at all;
I note no ray or jot
Of rareness in his lot,
Or star exceptional.
Into the dim
Dead throngs around
He'll sink, nor sound
Be left of him."
V
"Yet," said they, "his frail speech,
Hath accents pitched like thine -
Thy mould and his define
A likeness each to each -
But go! Deep pain
Alas, would be
His name to thee,
And told in vain!"
Feb. 2, 1899.
On Bishop Atterbury's Burying The Duke Of Buckingham
by Matthew Prior

I have no hopes, the Duke he says, and dies.
In sure and certain hopes, the prelate cries:
Of these two learned peers, I pr'ythee say, man,
Who is the lying knave, the priest or layman?
The Duke he stands an infidel confess'd:
He's our dear brother, quoth the lordly priest.
The Duke, though knave, still brother dear he cries
And who can say the reverend Prelate lies?
It's Not Going to Happen Again
by Rupert Brooke

I have known the most dear that is granted us here,
More supreme than the gods know above,
Like a star I was hurled through the sweet of the world,
And the height and the light of it, Love.
I have risen to the uttermost Heaven of Joy,
I have sunk to the sheer Hell of Pain
But, it's not going to happen again, my boy,
It's not going to happen again.
It's the very first word that poor Juliet heard
From her Romeo over the Styx;
And the Roman will tell Cleopatra in hell
When she starts her immortal old tricks;
What Paris was tellin' for good-bye to Helen
When he bundled her into the train
Oh, it's not going to happen again, old girl,
It's not going to happen again.
The Hymn Of The Republic
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I have listened to the sighing of the burdened and the bound,
I have heard it change to crying, with a menace in the sound;
I have seen the money-getters pass unheeding on the way,
As they went to forge new fetters for the people day by day.
Then the voice of Labour thundered forth its purpose and its need,
And I marvelled, and I wondered, at the cold dull ear of greed;
For as chimes, in some great steeple, tell the passing of the hour,
So the voices of the people tell the death of purchased power.
All the gathered dust of ages, God is brushing from His book;
He is opening up its pages, and He bids His children look;
And in shock and conflagration, and in pestilence and strife,
He is speaking to the nations, of the brevity of life.
Mother Earth herself is shaken by our sorrows and our crimes;
And she bids her sons awaken to the portent of the times;
With her travail pains upon her, she is hurling from their place
All the minions of dishonour, to admit the Coming Race.
By the voice of Justice bidden, she has torn the mask from might;
All the shameful secrets hidden, she is dragging into light;
And whoever wrongs his neighbour must be brought to judgment NOW,
Though he wear the badge of Labour, or a crown upon his brow.
There is growth in Revolution, if the word is understood;
It is one with Evolution, up from self, to brotherhood;
He who utters it unheeding, bent on self, or selfish gain,
His own day of doom is speeding, though he toil, or though he reign.
God is calling to the masses, to the peasant, and the peer;
He is calling to all classes, that the crucial hour is near;
For each rotting throne must tremble, and fall broken in the dust,
With the leaders who dissemble, and betray a people's trust.
Still the voice of God is calling; and above the wreck I see,
And beyond the gloom appalling, the great Government-to-Be.
From the ruins it has risen, and my soul is overjoyed,
For the school supplants the prison, and there are no 'unemployed.'
And there are no children's faces at the spindle or the loom;
They are out in sunny places, where the other sweet things bloom;
God has purified the alleys, He has set the white slaves free,
And they own the hills and valleys in this Government to-Be.
The Happy Night
by John Collings Squire, Sir

I have loved to-night; from love's last bordering steep
I have fallen at last with joy and forgotten the shore;
I have known my love to-night as never before,
I have flung myself in the deep, and drawn from the deep,
And kissed her lightly, and left my beloved to sleep.
And now I sit in the night and my heart is still:
Strong and secure; there is nothing that's left to will,
There is nothing to win but only a thing to keep.
And I look to-night, completed and not afraid,
Into the windy dark where shines no light;
And care not at all though the darkness never should fade,
Nor fear that death should suddenly come to-night.
Knowing my last would be surely my bravest breath,
I am happy to-night: I have laughed to-night at death.
A Geological Madrigal
by Bret Harte (Francis)

I have found out a gift for my fair;
I know where the fossils abound,
Where the footprints of Aves declare
The birds that once walked on the ground.
Oh, come, and in technical speech
We'll walk this Devonian shore,
Or on some Silurian beach
We'll wander, my love, evermore.
I will show thee the sinuous track
By the slow-moving Annelid made,
Or the Trilobite that, farther back,
In the old Potsdam sandstone was laid;
Thou shalt see, in his Jurassic tomb,
The Plesiosaurus embalmed;
In his Oolitic prime and his bloom,
Iguanodon safe and unharmed.
You wished I remember it well,
And I loved you the more for that wish
For a perfect cystedian shell
And a whole holocephalic fish.
And oh, if Earth's strata contains
In its lowest Silurian drift,
Or palaeozoic remains
The same, 'tis your lover's free gift!
Then come, love, and never say nay,
But calm all your maidenly fears;
We'll note, love, in one summer's day
The record of millions of years;
And though the Darwinian plan
Your sensitive feelings may shock,
We'll find the beginning of man,
Our fossil ancestors, in rock!
The Right To Die
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

I have no fancy for that ancient cant
That makes us masters of our destinies,
And not our lives, to hold or give them up
As will directs; I cannot, will not think
That men, the subtle worms, who plot and plan
And scheme and calculate with such shrewd wit,
Are such great blund'ring fools as not to know
When they have lived enough.
Men court not death
When there are sweets still left in life to taste.
Nor will a brave man choose to live when he,
Full deeply drunk of life, has reached the dregs,
And knows that now but bitterness remains.
He is the coward who, outfaced in this,
Fears the false goblins of another life.
I honor him who being much harassed
Drinks of sweet courage until drunk of it,--
Then seizing Death, reluctant, by the hand,
Leaps with him, fearless, to eternal peace!
Old Winters On The Farm
by James Whitcomb Riley

I have jest about decided
It 'ud keep a town-boy hoppin'
Fer to work all winter, choppin'
Fer a' old fire-place, like I did!
Lawz! them old times wuz contrairy! - 
Blame backbone o' winter, 'peared-like,
Wouldn't break! - and I wuz skeerd-like
Clean on into Febuary!
Nothin' ever made we madder
Than fer Pap to stomp in, layin'
On a' extra fore-stick, sayin'
"Groun'hog's out and seed his shadder!"
Introduction and Conclusion of a Long Poem
by Alan Seeger

I have gone sometimes by the gates of Death
And stood beside the cavern through whose doors
Enter the voyagers into the unseen.
From that dread threshold only, gazing back,
Have eyes in swift illumination seen
Life utterly revealed, and guessed therein
What things were vital and what things were vain.
Know then, like a vast ocean from my feet
Spreading away into the morning sky,
I saw unrolled my vanished days, and, lo,
Oblivion like a morning mist obscured
Toils, trials, ambitions, agitations, ease,
And like green isles, sun-kissed, with sweet perfume
Loading the airs blown back from that dim gulf,
Gleamed only through the all-involving haze
The hours when we have loved and been beloved.
Therefore, sweet friends, as often as by Love
You rise absorbed into the harmony
Of planets singing round magnetic suns,
Let not propriety nor prejudice
Nor the precepts of jealous age deny
What Sense so incontestably affirms;
Cling to the blessed moment and drink deep
Of the sweet cup it tends, as there alone
Were that which makes life worth the pain to live.
What is so fair as lovers in their joy
That dies in sleep, their sleep that wakes in joy?
Caressing arms are their light pillows. They
That like lost stars have wandered hitherto
Lonesome and lightless through the universe,
Now glow transfired at Nature's flaming core;
They are the centre; constellated heaven
Is the embroidered panoply spread round
Their bridal, and the music of the spheres
Rocks them in hushed epithalamium.
.    .    .    .    .
I know that there are those whose idle tongues
Blaspheme the beauty of the world that was
So wondrous and so worshipful to me.
I call them those that, in the palace where
Down perfumed halls the Sleeping Beauty lay,
Wandered without the secret or the key.
I know that there are those, of gentler heart,
Broken by grief or by deception bowed,
Who in some realm beyond the grave conceive
The bliss they found not here; but, as for me,
In the soft fibres of the tender flesh
I saw potentialities of Joy
Ten thousand lifetimes could not use. Dear Earth,
In this dark month when deep as morning dew
On thy maternal breast shall fall the blood
Of those that were thy loveliest and thy best,
If it be fate that mine shall mix with theirs,
Hear this my natural prayer, for, purified
By that Lethean agony and clad
In more resplendent powers, I ask nought else
Than reincarnate to retrace my path,
Be born again of woman, walk once more
Through Childhood's fragrant, flowery wonderland
And, entered in the golden realm of Youth,
Fare still a pilgrim toward the copious joys
I savored here yet scarce began to sip;
Yea, with the comrades that I loved so well
Resume the banquet we had scarce begun
When in the street we heard the clarion-call
And each man sprang to arms - ay, even myself
Who loved sweet Youth too truly not to share
Its pain no less than its delight. If prayers
Are to be prayed, lo, here is mine! Be this
My resurrection, this my recompense!