DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
Spleen I
by Charles Baudelaire

Pluvi'se, irrit' contre la ville enti're,
De son urne ' grands flots verse un froid t'n'breux
Aux p'les habitants du voisin cimeti're
Et la mortalit' sur les faubourgs brumeux.
Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une liti're
Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux;
L''me d'un vieux po'te erre dans la goutti're
Avec la triste voix d'un fant'me frileux.
Le bourdon se lamente, et la b'che enfum'e
Accompagne en fausset la pendule enrhum'e,
Cependant qu'en un jeu plein de sales parfums,
H'ritage fatal d'une vieille hydropique,
Le beau valet de c'ur et la dame de pique
Causent sinistrement de leurs amours d'funts.
To His Friend, On The Untunable Times.
by Robert Herrick

Play I could once; but, gentle friend, you see
My harp hung up here on the willow tree.
Sing I could once; and bravely, too, inspire
With luscious numbers my melodious lyre.
Draw I could once, although not stocks or stones,
Amphion-like, men made of flesh and bones,
Whither I would; but ah! I know not how,
I feel in me this transmutation now.
Grief, my dear friend, has first my harp unstrung,
Wither'd my hand, and palsy-struck my tongue.
Sonnet CXIII.
by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)

Pommi ove 'l sol occide i fiori e l' erba.
HIS INVINCIBLE CONSTANCY.
Place me where herb and flower the sun has dried,
Or where numb winter's grasp holds sterner sway:
Place me where Phoebus sheds a temperate ray,
Where first he glows, where rests at eventide.
Place me in lowly state, in power and pride,
Where lour the skies, or where bland zephyrs play
Place me where blind night rules, or lengthened day,
In age mature, or in youth's boiling tide:
Place me in heaven, or in the abyss profound,
On lofty height, or in low vale obscure,
A spirit freed, or to the body bound;
Bank'd with the great, or all unknown to fame,
I still the same will be! the same endure!
And my trilustral sighs still breathe the same!
DACRE.
Place me where Phoebus burns each herb, each flower;
Or where cold snows, and frost o'ercome his rays:
Place me where rolls his car with temp'rate blaze;
In climes that feel not, or that feel his power.
Place me where fortune may look bright, or lour;
Mid murky airs, or where soft zephyr plays:
Place me in night, in long or short-lived days,
Where age makes sad, or youth gilds ev'ry hour:
Place me on mountains high, in vallies drear,
In heaven, on earth, in depths unknown to-day;
Whether life fosters still, or flies this clay:
Place me where fame is distant, where she's near:
Still will I love; nor shall those sighs yet cease,
Which thrice five years have robb'd this breast of peace.
ANON. 1777.
Place me where angry Titan burns the Moor,
And thirsty Afric fiery monsters brings,
Or where the new-born phoenix spreads her wings,
And troops of wond'ring birds her flight adore:
Place me by Gange, or Ind's empamper'd shore,
Where smiling heavens on earth cause double springs:
Place me where Neptune's quire of Syrens sings,
Or where, made hoarse through cold, he leaves to roar:
Me place where Fortune doth her darlings crown,
A wonder or a spark in Envy's eye,
Or late outrageous fates upon me frown,
And pity wailing, see disaster'd me.
Affection's print my mind so deep doth prove,
I may forget myself, but not my love.
DRUMMOND.
Nursery Rhyme. DLVI. Natural History.
by Unknown

Pitty Patty Polt,
Shoe the wild colt!
Here a nail;
And there a nail;
Pitty Patty Polt.
Sonnet LXIII.
by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)

Occhi, piangete; accompagnate il core.
DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE POET AND HIS EYES.
Playne ye, myne eyes, accompanye my harte,
For, by your fault, lo, here is death at hand!
Ye brought hym first into this bitter band,
And of his harme as yett ye felt no part;
But now ye shall: Lo! here beginnes your smart.
Wett shall you be, ye shall it not withstand
With weepinge teares that shall make dymm your sight,
And mystic clowdes shall hang still in your light.
Blame but yourselves that kyndlyd have this brand,
With suche desyre to strayne that past your might;
But, since by you the hart hath caught his harme,
His flam'd heat shall sometyme make you warme.
HARRINGTON.
P.     Weep, wretched eyes, accompany the heart
Which only from your weakness death sustains.
E. Weep? evermore we weep; with keener pains
For others' error than our own we smart.
P. Love, entering first through you an easy part,
Took up his seat, where now supreme he reigns.
E. We oped to him the way, but Hope the veins
First fired of him now stricken by death's dart.
P. The lots, as seems to you, scarce equal fall
'Tween heart and eyes, for you, at first sight, were
Enamour'd of your common ill and shame.
E. This is the thought which grieves us most of all;
For perfect judgments are on earth so rare
That one man's fault is oft another's blame.
MACGREGOR.
Loggerheads
by D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Richards)

Please yourself how you have it.
Take my words, and fling
Them down on the counter roundly;
See if they ring.
Sift my looks and expressions,
And see what proportion there is
Of sand in my doubtful sugar
Of verities.
Have a real stock-taking
Of my manly breast;
Find out if I'm sound or bankrupt,
Or a poor thing at best.
For I am quite indifferent
To your dubious state,
As to whether you've found a fortune
In me, or a flea-bitten fate.
Make a good investigation
Of all that is there,
And then, if it's worth it, be grateful - 
If not then despair.
If despair is our portion
Then let us despair.
Let us make for the weeping willow.
I don't care.
Play.
by Charles Stuart Calverley

Play, play, while as yet it is day:
While the sweet sunlight is warm on the brae!
Hark to the lark singing lay upon lay,
While the brown squirrel eats nuts on the spray
And in the apple-leaves chatters the jay!
Play, play, even as they!
What though the cowslips ye pluck will decay,
What though the grass will be presently hay?
What though the noise that ye make should dismay
Old Mrs. Clutterbuck over the way?
Play, play, for your locks will grow gray;
Even the marbles ye sport with are clay.
Play, ay in the crowded highway:
Was it not made for you? Yea, my lad, yea.
True that the babes you were bid to convey
Home may fall out or be stolen or stray;
True that the tip-cat you toss about may
Strike an old gentleman, cause him to sway,
Stumble, and p'raps be run o'er by a dray:
Still why delay? Play, my son, play!
Barclay and Perkins, not you, have to pay.
Play, play, your sonatas in A,
Heedless of what your next neighbour may say!
Dance and be gay as a faun or a fay,
Sing like the lad in the boat on the bay;
Sing, play - if your neighbours inveigh
Feebly against you, they're lunatics, eh?
Bang, twang, clatter and clang,
Strum, thrum, upon fiddle and drum;
Neigh, bray, simply obey
All your sweet impulses, stop not or stay!
Rattle the "bones," hit a tinbottom'd tray
Hard with the fireshovel, hammer away!
Is not your neighbour your natural prey?
Should he confound you, it's only in play.
The Human Abstract
by William Blake

Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor,
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.
And mutual fear brings Peace,
Till the selfish loves increase;
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
He sits down with his holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears;
Then Humility takes its root
Underneath his foot.
Soon spreads the dismal shade
Of Mystery over his head,
And the caterpillar and fly
Feed on the Mystery.
And it bears the fruit of Deceit,
Ruddy and sweet to eat,
And the raven his nest has made
In its thickest shade.
The gods of the earth and sea
Sought through nature to find this tree,
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the human Brain.
Places
by Sara Teasdale

Places I love come back to me like music,
Hush me and heal me when I am very tired;
I see the oak woods at Saxton's flaming
In a flare of crimson by the frost newly fired;
And I am thirsty for the spring in the valley
As for a kiss ungiven and long desired.
I know a bright world of snowy hills at Boonton,
A blue and white dazzling light on everything one sees,
The ice-covered branches of the hemlocks sparkle
Bending low and tinkling in the sharp thin breeze,
And iridescent crystals fall and crackle on the snow-crust
With the winter sun drawing cold blue shadows from the trees.
Violet now, in veil on veil of evening
The hills across from Cromwell grow dreamy and far;
A wood-thrush is singing soft as a viol
In the heart of the hollow where the dark pools are;
The primrose has opened her pale yellow flowers
And heaven is lighting star after star.
Places I love come back to me like music,
Mid-ocean, midnight, the waves buzz drowsily;
In the ship's deep churning the eerie phosphorescence
Is like the souls of people who were drowned at sea,
And I can hear a man's voice, speaking, hushed, insistent,
At midnight, in mid-ocean, hour on hour to me.
Nursery Rhyme. D. Natural History.
by Unknown

Pit, Pat, well-a-day,
Little Robin flew away;
Where can little Robin be?
Gone into the cherry tree.
Sean O'Cosgair
by James Stephens

Pity it was that you should ever stand
In ship or boat,
Or that you went afloat
Inside that ship!
The lusty steps you took!
The ways and journeys you knew how to wend
From London back to Beltra,
And this end!
You who could swim so well!
What time you sported in the lifting tides
The girls swam out to you, and held your sides
When they were weary, for they knew they were
Safe, because you were there.
Your little-mother thought that this was true
(And so she made no stir
Till you were found),
Although an hundred might be drown'd, you
Would come back safe to her,
And not be drowned!
Missed.
by Alfred Castner King

Pity the child who never feels
A mother's fond caress;
That childish smile a void conceals
Of aching loneliness.
Pity the heart which loves in vain,
What balm or mystic spell
Can soothe that bosom's secret pain,
The pain it may not tell?
Pity those missed by Cupid's darts,
For 'twas ordained for such,
Who love at random, but whose hearts
Feel no responsive touch.
A Utilitarian View Of The Monitor's Fight
by Herman Melville

Plain be the phrase, yet apt the verse,
More ponderous than nimble;
For since grimed War here laid aside
His Orient pomp, 'twould ill befit
Overmuch to ply
The rhyme's barbaric cymbal.
Hail to victory without the gaud
Of glory; zeal that needs no fans
Of banners; plain mechanic power
Plied cogently in War now placed--
Where War belongs--
Among the trades and artisans.
Yet this was battle, and intense--
Beyond the strife of fleets heroic;
Deadlier, closer, calm 'mid storm;
No passion; all went on by crank,
Pivot, and screw,
And calculations of caloric.
Needless to dwell; the story's known.
The ringing of those plates on plates
Still ringeth round the world--
The clangor of that blacksmiths' fray.
The anvil-din
Resounds this message from the Fates:
War shall yet be, and to the end;
But war-paint shows the streaks of weather;
War yet shall be, but warriors
Are now but operatives; War's made
Less grand than Peace,
And a singe runs through lace and feather.
Sonnets: Idea XLVI
by Michael Drayton

Plain-pathed experience, the unlearn'd's guide,
Her simple followers evidently shows
Sometimes what schoolmen scarcely can decide,
Nor yet wise reason absolutely knows;
In making trial of a murder wrought,
If the vile actors of the heinous deed
Near the dead body happily be brought,
Oft 't hath been proved the breathless corse will bleed.
She coming near, that my poor heart hath slain,
Long since departed, to the world no more,
The ancient wounds no longer can contain,
But fall to bleeding as they did before.
But what of this? Should she to death be led,
It furthers justice but helps not the dead.
Cupid Armed.
by Thomas Moore

Place the helm on thy brow,
In thy hand take the spear;--
Thou art armed, Cupid, now,
And thy battle-hour is near.
March on! march on! thy shaft and bow
Were weak against such charms;
March on! march on! so proud a foe
Scorns all but martial arms.
See the darts in her eyes,
Tipt with scorn, how they shine!
Every shaft, as it flies,
Mocking proudly at thine.
March on! march on! thy feathered darts
Soft bosoms soon might move;
But ruder arms to ruder hearts
Must teach what 'tis to love.
Place the helm on thy brow;
In thy hand take the spear,--
Thou art armed, Cupid, now,
And thy battle-hour is near.
Pleasure! why thus desert the heart
by Walter Savage Landor

Pleasure! why thus desert the heart
In its spring-tide?
I could have seen her, I could part,
And but have sigh'd!
O'er every youthful charm to stray,
To gaze, to touch....
Pleasure! why take so much away,
Or give so much?
The Playing Infant.
by Friedrich Schiller

Play on thy mother's bosom, babe, for in that holy isle
The error cannot find thee yet, the grieving, nor the guile;
Held in thy mother's arms above life's dark and troubled wave,
Thou lookest with thy fearless smile upon the floating grave.
Play, loveliest innocence! Thee yet Arcadia circles round,
A charmed power for thee has set the lists of fairy ground;
Each gleesome impulse Nature now can sanction and befriend,
Nor to that willing heart as yet the duty and the end.
Play, for the haggard labor soon will come to seize its prey.
Alas! when duty grows thy law, enjoyment fades away!
Garden-Fancies - II. Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis
by Robert Browning

I.
Plague take all your pedants, say I!
He who wrote what I hold in my hand,
Centuries back was so good as to die,
Leaving this rubbish to cumber the land;
This, that was a book in its time,
Printed on paper and bound in leather,
Last month in the white of a matin-prime
Just when the birds sang all together.
II.
Into the garden I brought it to read,
And under the arbute and laurustine
Read it, so help me grace in my need,
From title-page to closing line.
Chapter on chapter did I count,
As a curious traveller counts Stonehenge;
Added up the mortal amount;
And then proceeded to my revenge.
III.
Yonder's a plum-tree with a crevice
An owl would build in, were he but sage;
For a lap of moss, like a fine pont-levis
In a castle of the Middle Age,
Joins to a lip of gum, pure amber;
When he'd be private, there might he spend
Hours alone in his lady's chamber:
Into this crevice I dropped our friend.
IV.
Splash, went he, as under he ducked,
At the bottom, I knew, rain-drippings stagnate;
Next, a handful of blossoms I plucked
To bury him with, my bookshelf's magnate;
Then I went in-doors, brought out a loaf,
Half a cheese, and a bottle of Chablis;
Lay on the grass and forgot the oaf
Over a jolly chapter of Rabelais.
V.
Now, this morning, betwixt the moss
And gum that locked our friend in limbo,
A spider had spun his web across,
And sat in the midst with arms akimbo:
So, I took pity, for learning's sake,
And, de profundis, accentibus l'tis,
Cantate! quoth I, as I got a rake;
And up I fished his delectable treatise.
VI.
Here you have it, dry in the sun,
With all the binding all of a blister,
And great blue spots where the ink has run,
And reddish streaks that wink and glister
O'er the page so beautifully yellow,
Oh, well have the droppings played their tricks!
Did he guess how toadstools grow, this fellow?
Here's one stuck in his chapter six!
VII.
How did he like it when the live creatures
Tickled and toused and browsed him all over,
And worm, slug, eft, with serious features,
Came in, each one, for his right of trover;
When the water-beetle with great blind deaf face
Made of her eggs the stately deposit,
And the newt borrowed just so much of the preface
As tiled in the top of his black wife's closet?
VIII.
All that life and fun and romping,
All that frisking and twisting and coupling,
While slowly our poor friend's leaves were swamping
And clasps were cracking and covers suppling!
As if you had carried sour John Knox
To the play-house at Paris, Vienna or Munich,
Fastened him into a front-row box,
And danced off the Ballet with trousers and tunic.
IX.
Come, old Martyr! What, torment enough is it?
Back to my room shall you take your sweet self.
Good-bye, mother-beetle; husband-eft, sufficit!
See the snug niche I have made on my shelf!
A.'s book shall prop you up, B.'s shall cover you,
Here's C. to be grave with, or D. to be gay,
And with E. on each side, and F. right over you,
Dry-rot at ease till the Judgment-day!
Fragment.
by Thomas Moore

Pity me, love! I'll pity thee,
If thou indeed hast felt like me.
All, all my bosom's peace is o'er!
At night, which was my hour of calm,
When from the page of classic lore,
From the pure fount of ancient lay
My soul has drawn the placid balm,
Which charmed its every grief away,
Ah! there I find that balm no more.
Those spells, which make us oft forget
The fleeting troubles of the day,
In deeper sorrows only whet
The stings they cannot tear away.
When to my pillow racked I fly,
With weary sense and wakeful eye.
While my brain maddens, where, oh, where
Is that serene consoling prayer,
Which once has harbingered my rest,
When the still soothing voice of Heaven
Hath seemed to whisper in my breast,
"Sleep on, thy errors are forgiven!"
No, though I still in semblance pray,
My thoughts are wandering far away,
And even the name of Deity
Is murmured out in sighs for thee.
Motto.
by James McIntyre

Politeness, perseverance and pluck,
To their possessor will bring good luck.
Polly Put The Kettle On
by Walter Crane

Polly, put the kettle on,
Polly, put the kettle on,
Polly, put the kettle on,
We'll all have tea.
Sukey, take it off again,
Sukey, take it off again,
Sukey, take it off again,
They've all gone away.
Inscriptions (Of Poets And Poetry)
by Richard Le Gallienne

Poet, a truce to your song!
Have you heard the heart sing?
Like a brook among trees,
Like the humming of bees,
Like the ripple of wine:
Had you heard, would you stay
Blowing bubbles so long?
You have ears for the spheres -
Have you heard the heart sing?
*             *             *             *             *
Have you loved the good books of the world, -
And written none?
Have you loved the great poet, -
And burnt your little rhyme?
'O be my friend, and teach me to be thine.'
*             *             *             *             *
By many hands the work of God is done,
Swart toil, pale thought, flushed dream, he spurneth none:
Yea! and the weaver of a little rhyme
Is seen his worker in his own full time.
Byron.
by James McIntyre

Poets they do pursue each theme,
Under a gentle head of steam,
Save one who needed fierce fire on,
The brilliant, pasionate Byron.
His child Harold's pilgrimage,
Forever will the world engage;
He fought with glory to release
From Turkish yoke the isles of Greece,
Its glories oft by him were sung,
This wondrous bard, alas, died young.
Nirvana
by Clark Ashton Smith

Poised as a god whose lone, detach'd post,
An eyrie, pends between the boundary-marks
Of finite years, and those unvaried darks
That veil Eternity, I saw the host
Of worlds and suns, swept from the furthermost
Of night - confusion as of dust with sparks -
Whirl tow'rd the opposing brink; as one who harks
Some warning trumpet, Time, a withered ghost,
Fled with them; disunited orbs that late
Were atoms of the universal frame,
They passed to some eternal fragment-heap.
And, lo, the gods, from space discorporate,
Who were its life and vital spirit, came,
Drawn outward by the vampire-lips of Sleep!
The Egyptian Tomb.
by William Lisle Bowles

Pomp of Egypt's elder day,
Shade of the mighty passed away,
Whose giant works still frown sublime
'Mid the twilight shades of Time;
Fanes, of sculpture vast and rude,
That strew the sandy solitude,
Lo! before our startled eyes,
As at a wizard's wand, ye rise,
Glimmering larger through the gloom!
While on the secrets of the tomb,
Rapt in other times, we gaze,
The Mother Queen of ancient days,
Her mystic symbol in her hand,
Great Isis, seems herself to stand.
From mazy vaults, high-arched and dim,
Hark! heard ye not Osiris' hymn?
And saw ye not in order dread
The long procession of the dead?
Forms that the night of years concealed,
As by a flash, are here revealed;
Chiefs who sang the victor song;
Sceptred kings, - a shadowy throng, - 
From slumber of three thousand years
Each, as in light and life, appears,
Stern as of yore! Yes, vision vast,
Three thousand years have silent passed,
Suns of empire risen and set,
Whose story Time can ne'er forget,
Time, in the morning of her pride
Immense, along the Nile's green side,
The City[197] of the Sun appeared,
And her gigantic image reared.
As Memnon, like a trembling string
When the sun, with rising ray,
Streaked the lonely desert gray,
Sent forth its magic murmuring,
That just was heard, - then died away;
So passed, O Thebes! thy morning pride!
Thy glory was the sound that died!
Dark city of the desolate,
Once thou wert rich, and proud, and great!
This busy-peopled isle was then
A waste, or roamed by savage men
Whose gay descendants now appear
To mark thy wreck of glory here.
Phantom of that city old,
Whose mystic spoils I now behold,
A kingdom's sepulchre, oh say,
Shall Albion's own illustrious day,
Thus darkly close! Her power, her fame
Thus pass away, a shade, a name!
The Mausoleum murmured as I spoke;
A spectre seemed to rise, like towering smoke;
It answered not, but pointed as it fled
To the black carcase of the sightless dead.
Once more I heard the sounds of earthly strife,
And the streets ringing to the stir of life.
To Ralph Waldo Emerson
by Richard Le Gallienne

Poet, whose words are like the tight-packed seed
Sealed in the capsule of a silver flower,
Still at your art we wonder as we read,
The art dynamic charging each word with power.
Seeds of the silver flower of Emerson:
One, on the winds to Scotland brought, did sink
In Carlyle's heart; and one was lately blown
To Belgium, and flowered in - Maeterlinck.
For The Birthday Of Edgar Allan Poe
by Richard Le Gallienne

(January 19, 1909)
Poet of doom, dementia, and death,
Of beauty singing in a charnel house,
Like the lost soul of a poor moon-mad maid,
With too much loving of some lord of hell;
Doomed and disastrous spirit, to what shore
Of what dark gulf infernal art thou strayed,
Or to what spectral star of topless heaven
Art lifted and enthroned?
The winter dark,
And the drear winter cold that welcomed thee
To a world all winter, gird with ice and storm
Thy January day - yea! the same world
Of winter and the wintry hearts of men;
And still, for all thy shining, the same swarm
That mocked thy song gather about thy fame,
With the small murmur of the undying worm,
And whisper, blind and foul, amid thy dust.
Prelude.
by Susan Coolidge (Sarah Chauncey Woolsey)

Poems are heavenly things,
And only souls with wings
May reach them where they grow,
May pluck and bear below,
Feeding the nations thus
With food all glorious.
Verses are not of these;
They bloom on earthly trees,
Poised on a low-hung stem,
And those may gather them
Who cannot fly to where
The heavenly gardens are.
So I by devious ways
Have pulled some easy sprays
From the down-dropping bough
Which all may reach, and now
I knot them, bud and leaf,
Into a rhymed sheaf.
Not mine the pinion strong
To win the nobler song;
I only cull and bring
A hedge-row offering
Of berry, flower, and brake,
If haply some may take.
Poets To Come
by Walt Whitman

Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me, and answer what I am for;
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,
Arouse! Arouse - for you must justify me - you must answer.
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.