DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
Mary Rivers
by Henry Kendall

Path beside the silver waters, flashing in October's sun
Walk, by green and golden margins where the sister streamlets run
Twenty shining springs have vanished, full of flower, and leaf, and bird,
Since the step of Mary Rivers in your lawny dell was heard!
Twenty white-haired Junes have left us grey with frost and bleak with gale
Since the hand of her we loved so plucked the blossoms in your dale.
Twenty summers, twenty autumns, from the grand old hills have passed,
With their robes of royal colour, since we saw the darling last.
Morning comes the blessed morning! and the slow song of the sea,
Like a psalm from radiant altars, floats across a rose-red lea;
Then the fair, strong noonday blossoms, and the reaper seeks the cool
Valley of the moss and myrtle, and the glimmering water-pool.
Noonday flames and evening follows; and the lordly mountains rest
Heads arrayed with tenfold splendour on the rich heart of the West.
Evening walks with moon and music where the higher life has been;
But the face of Mary Rivers there will nevermore be seen.
Ah! when autumn dells are dewy, and the wave is very still,
And that grey ghost called the Twilight passes from the distant hill
Even in the hallowed nightfall, when the fathers sit and dream,
And the splendid rose of heaven sees a sister in the stream
Often do I watch the waters gleaming in a starry bay,
Thinking of a bygone beauty, and a season far away;
Musing on the grace that left us in a time of singing rain,
On the lady who will never walk amongst these heaths again.
Four there were, but two were taken; and this darling we deplore,
She was sweetest of the circle she was dearest of the four!
In the daytime and the dewtime comes the phantom of her face:
None will ever sit where she did none will ever fill her place.
With the passing of our Mary, like a sunset out of sight,
Passed away our pure first passion all its life and all its light!
All that made the world a dreamland all the glory and the glow
Of the fine, fresh, morning feeling vanished twenty years ago.
Girl, whose strange, unearthly beauty haunts us ever in our sleep,
Many griefs have worn our hearts out we are now too tired to weep!
Time has tried us, years have changed us; but the sweetness shed by you
Falls upon our spirits daily, like divine, immortal dew.
Shining are our thoughts about you of the blossoms past recall,
You are still the rose of lustre still the fairest of them all;
In the sleep that brings the garland gathered from the bygone hours,
You are still our Mary Rivers still the queen of all the flowers.
Let me ask, where none can hear me When you passed into the shine,
And you heard a great love calling, did you know that it was mine?
In your life of light and music, tell me did you ever see,
Shining in a holy silence, what was as a flame in me?
Ah, my darling! no one saw it. Purer than untrodden dew
Was that first unhappy passion buried in the grave with you.
Bird and leaf will keep the secret wind and wood will never tell
Men the thing that I have whispered. Mary Rivers, fare you well!
Inscription For A Rural Cemetery.
by Samuel Griswold Goodrich

Peace to the dead! The forest weaves,
Around your couch, its shroud of leaves;
While shadows dim and silence deep,
Bespeak the quiet of your sleep.
Rest, pilgrim, here! Your journey o'er,
Life's weary cares ye heed no more;
Time's sun has set, in yonder west 
Your work is done rest, Pilgrim, rest!
Rest till the morning hour; wait
Here, at Eternity's dread gate,
Safe in the keeping of the sod,
And the sure promises of God.
Dark is your home yet round the tomb,
Tokens of hope sweet flowerets bloom;
And cherished memories, soft and dear,
Blest as their fragrance, linger here!
We speak, yet ye are dumb! How dread
This deep, stern silence of the Dead!
The whispers of the Grave, severe,
The listening Soul alone can hear!
Peace Be Around Thee. (Scotch Air.)
by Thomas Moore

Peace be around thee, wherever thou rov'st;
May life be for thee one summer's day,
And all that thou wishest and all that thou lov'st
Come smiling around thy sunny way!
If sorrow e'er this calm should break,
May even thy tears pass off so lightly,
Like spring-showers, they'll only make
The smiles, that follow shine more brightly.
May Time who sheds his blight o'er all
And daily dooms some joy to death
O'er thee let years so gently fall,
They shall not crush one flower beneath.
As half in shade and half in sun
This world along its path advances.
May that side the sun's upon
Be all that e'er shall meet thy glances!
The Ghost
by Walter De La Mare

Peace in thy hands,
Peace in thine eyes,
Peace on thy brow;
Flower of a moment in the eternal hour,
Peace with me now.
Not a wave breaks,
Not a bird calls,
My heart, like a sea,
Silent after a storm that hath died,
Sleeps within me.
All the night's dews,
All the world's leaves,
All winter's snow
Seem with their quiet to have stilled in life's dream
All sorrowing now.
Beginnings And Endings.
by Robert Herrick

Paul, he began ill, but he ended well;
Judas began well, but he foully fell:
In godliness not the beginnings so
Much as the ends are to be look'd unto.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets - Part III. - XV - Concluded. American Episcopacy
by William Wordsworth

III Concluded. American Episcopacy
Patriots informed with Apostolic light
Were they, who, when their Country had been freed,
Bowing with reverence to the ancient creed,
Fixed on the frame of England's Church their sight,
And strove in filial love to reunite
What force had severed. Thence they fetched the seed
Of Christian unity, and won a meed
Of praise from Heaven. To Thee, O saintly white,
Patriarch of a wide-spreading family,
Remotest lands and unborn times shall turn,
Whether they would restore or build to Thee,
As one who rightly taught how zeal should burn,
As one who drew from out Faith's holiest urn
The purest stream of patient Energy.
Elysium.
by Friedrich Schiller

Past the despairing wail
And the bright banquets of the Elysian vale
Melt every care away!
Delight, that breathes and moves forever,
Glides through sweet fields like some sweet river!
Elysian life survey!
There, fresh with youth, o'er jocund meads,
His merry west-winds blithely leads
The ever-blooming May!
Through gold-woven dreams goes the dance of the hours,
In space without bounds swell the soul and its powers,
And truth, with no veil, gives her face to the day.
And joy to-day and joy to-morrow,
But wafts the airy soul aloft;
The very name is lost to sorrow,
And pain is rapture tuned more exquisitely soft.
Here the pilgrim reposes the world-weary limb,
And forgets in the shadow, cool-breathing and dim,
The load he shall bear never more;
Here the mower, his sickle at rest, by the streams,
Lulled with harp-strings, reviews, in the calm of his dreams,
The fields, when the harvest is o'er.
Here, he, whose ears drank in the battle roar,
Whose banners streamed upon the startled wind
A thunder-storm, before whose thunder tread
The mountains trembled, in soft sleep reclined,
By the sweet brook that o'er its pebbly bed
In silver plays, and murmurs to the shore,
Hears the stern clangor of wild spears no more!
Here the true spouse the lost-beloved regains,
And on the enamelled couch of summer-plains
Mingles sweet kisses with the zephyr's breath.
Here, crowned at last, love never knows decay,
Living through ages its one bridal day,
Safe from the stroke of death!
Ode To Apollo. On An Inkglass Almost Dried In The Sun.
by William Cowper

Patron of all those luckless brains,
That, to the wrong side leaning,
Indite much metre with much pains,
And little or no meaning;
Ah why, since oceans, rivers, streams,
That water all the nations,
Pay tribute to thy glorious beams,
In constant exhalations;
Why, stooping from the noon of day,
Too covetous of drink,
Apollo, hast thou stolen away
A poet's drop of ink?
Upborne into the viewless air,
It floats a vapour now,
Impell'd through regions dense and rare,
By all the winds that blow.
Ordain'd perhaps, ere summer flies,
Combined with millions more,
To form an iris in the skies,
Though black and foul before.
Illustrious drop! and happy then
Beyond the happiest lot,
Of all that ever pass'd my pen,
So soon to be forgot!
Ph'bus, if such be thy design,
To place it in thy bow,
Give wit, that what is left may shine
With equal grace below.
Upon Paul. Epig.
by Robert Herrick

Paul's hands do give; what give they, bread or meat,
Or money? no, but only dew and sweat.
As stones and salt gloves use to give, even so
Paul's hands do give, nought else for ought we know.
Dirge.
by William Lisle Bowles

Peace, oh! peace, be to the shade
Of him who here in earth is laid:
Saints and spirits of the blessed,
Look upon his bed of rest;
Forgive his sins, propitious be;
Dona pacem, Domine,
Dona pacem, Domine!
When, from yonder window's height,
The moonbeams on the floor are bright,
Sounds of viewless harps shall die,
Sounds of heaven's own harmony!
Forgive his sins, propitious be;
Dona pacem, Domine,
Dona pacem, Domine!
By the spirits of the brave,
Who died the land they loved to save;
By the soldier's faint farewell,
By freedom's blessing, where he fell;
Forgive his sins, propitious be;
Dona pacem, Domine,
Dona pacem, Domine!
By a nation's mingled moan,
By liberty's expiring groan,
By the saints, to whom 'tis given
To bear that parting groan to heaven;
To his shade propitious be;
Dona pacem, Domine,
Dona pacem, Domine!
Ancestral Memory
by Paul Cameron Brown

Patrician to my plebian,
aristocratic leaning versus
unbridled backwoods feeling    - 
distinct Old World breeding
countering rudest colonial lean-to;
his carcass lay, roadworthy,
blinking back cold starlight
with all the forest as silent voyeur
stretching for a look,
black fur & quills
in disarray like Crazy Horse's warpaint
after the Big Horn,
this roughneck Canadian porcupine
shot clean with bumper & chrome.
Then little hedge-pig
quaint as porcelain china cup
half a world away
greeting pints of milk
in an English doorway
half his scalp torn thru
dirty, British lorry choking fumes
the petrol in its tank loose.
Resurrection
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Pausing a moment ere the day was done,
While yet the earth was scintillant with light,
I backward glanced.    From valley, plain, and height,
At intervals, where my life-path had run,
Rose cross on cross; and nailed upon each one
Was my dead self.    And yet that gruesome sight
Lent sudden splendour to the falling night,
Showing the conquests that my soul had won.
Up to the rising stars I looked and cried,
'There is no death! for year on year, re-born
I wake to larger life:    to joy more great,
So many times have I been crucified,
So often seen the resurrection morn,
I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait.
Inscription For The Tomb Of Mr. Hamilton.
by William Cowper

Pause here and think: a monitory rhyme
Demands one moment of thy fleeting time.
Consult life's silent clock, thy bounding vein;
Seems it to say''Health here has long to reign?'
Hast thou the vigour of thy youth? an eye
That beams delight? a heart untaught to sigh?
Yet fear. Youth, ofttimes healthful and at ease,
Anticipates a day it never sees;
And many a tomb, like Hamilton's, aloud
Exclaims 'Prepare thee for an early shroud.'
Epilogue To "The Pilgrim."
by John Dryden

Perhaps the parson[1] stretch'd a point too far,
When with our Theatres he waged a war.
He tells you, that this very moral age
Received the first infection from the stage.
But sure, a banish'd court, with lewdness fraught,
The seeds of open vice, returning, brought.
Thus lodged (as vice by great example thrives)
It first debauch'd the daughters and the wives.
London, a fruitful soil, yet never bore
So plentiful a crop of horns before.
The poets, who must live by courts, or starve,
Were proud so good a government to serve:
And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane,
Tainted the stage, for some small snip of gain.
For they, like harlots under bawds profess'd,
Took all the ungodly pains, and got the least.
Thus did the thriving malady prevail:
The court, its head, the poets but the tail.
The sin was of our native growth, 'tis true;
The scandal of the sin was wholly new.
Misses they were, but modestly conceal'd;
Whitehall the naked Venus first reveal'd,
Who, standing as at Cyprus, in her shrine,
The strumpet was adored with rites divine.
Ere this, if saints had any secret motion,
'Twas chamber-practice all, and close devotion.
I pass the peccadilloes of their time;
Nothing but open lewdness was a crime.
A monarch's blood was venial to the nation,
Compared with one foul act of fornication.
Now, they would silence us, and shut the door,
That let in all the barefaced vice before.
As for reforming us, which some pretend,
That work in England is without an end:
Well may we change, but we shall never mend.
Yet, if you can but bear the present Stage,
We hope much better of the coming age.
What would you say, if we should first begin
To stop the trade of love behind the scene,
Where actresses make bold with married men?
For while abroad so prodigal the dolt is,
Poor spouse at home as ragged as a colt is.
In short, we'll grow as moral as we can,
Save here and there a woman or a man:
But neither you, nor we, with all our pains,
Can make clean work; there will be some remains,
While you have still your Oates, and we our Haines.
"Perhaps You'D Like To Buy A Flower?"
by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

Perhaps you'd like to buy a flower?
But I could never sell.
If you would like to borrow
Until the daffodil
Unties her yellow bonnet
Beneath the village door,
Until the bees, from clover rows
Their hock and sherry draw,
Why, I will lend until just then,
But not an hour more!
Pensive On Her Dead Gazing, I Heard The Mother Of All
by Walt Whitman

Pensive, on her dead gazing, I heard the Mother of All,
Desperate, on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battle-fields gazing;
(As the last gun ceased but the scent of the powder-smoke linger'd;)
As she call'd to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk'd:
Absorb them well, O my earth, she cried I charge you, lose not my sons! lose not an atom;
And you streams, absorb them well, taking their dear blood;
And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly,
And all you essences of soil and growth and you, my rivers' depths;
And you, mountain sides and the woods where my dear children's blood, trickling, redden'd;
And you trees, down in your roots, to bequeath to all future trees,
My dead absorb my young men's beautiful bodies absorb and their precious, precious, precious blood;
Which holding in trust for me, faithfully back again give me, many a year hence,
In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence;
In blowing airs from the fields, back again give me my darlings give my immortal heroes;
Exhale me them centuries hence breathe me their breath let not an atom be lost;
O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!
Exhale them perennial, sweet death, years, centuries hence.
When Labouring To Break
by Paul Cameron Brown

Perhaps one is in prison    - 
fidgeting as time
draws to a close    - 
a scrap of house tunic
between the fingers
or when labouring to break
cuticles on swollen fingers
pressing both hands against ears
that refuse to hear the stop sound
of rushing blood.
Then again, in the last hour before
end time, before dawn's arrival and
floodlit sky finds you    - 
knuckles clasping bars, pitiless bayonet-like
with eyes swishing truncheons at all the
getaway air your lungs will never take;
wheezing in growing fear to the sound of footsteps,
clank of keys and gallow's humour as they prepare
to Skuttle your short life, wall up clouds of their
own pestilence nakedly mask each firing squad
gathering for its fighting chance.
Antarctica
by Paul Cameron Brown

Perhaps it is needed to balance the planet: to provide
employment for penguins, or that ice in the form of
crystals calls forth tiny sleighs.
That the orange hibiscus be associated only with deepest tropics
...plankton learn to feed Baleen whales
And iron hulks, off ships. submit to greater Masters. the elements.
Second Theories
Another supposition projects...
snowy wastes are but vapour trails of jets and tatter sails.
Sleet comes only from cannonized rain, galvanized by inclement ironmongers.
Yet a third hypothesizes frozen energy is stored in the
form of ice caps and that the lost amongst departed
souls are reborn with every powdery breath.
Ptolemy knew of a southern polar continent. Cook
and Shackelton attempted separate conquests. Ships
voyaged as early twentieth century probes amid
frozen stellar space nudging Earth's feet.
Footprints the size of muskets where left as evidence.
So were a few red flags. No oxygen bottles trailed the
ascent like those that packed Everest. Amundsen as
to Hillary across the South Sea face, yet this
Matterhorn has a logic and bedevilment all her own.
Norway and Russia claim exploration of her frigid
body. The British in the first virginal thrust
christened Queen Maud Land after a brilliant
courtship. Shades of Spencer and his Faery Queen;
the Kron Prins Olaf Coast, anyone?
Ice. South of the Antipodes. The floor of the world.
Magnificant pack to the drunken global jaw, growlers
or submerged ice packs. A cold porterhouse steak to
ward off the combattive edge, the chronic boxer's
inflamed orifice and eye    -    the nosebleed's staunchest friend.
Terra Australis Incognita, the supposed southern
continent; hoof of the Cenotaur stringing men like a
bow across nipples like raw wounds. clotted hair and
blood on a precipice for a chest.
Nos Immortales
by Stephen Vincent Benet

Perhaps we go with wind and cloud and sun,
Into the free companionship of air;
Perhaps with sunsets when the day is done,
All's one to me -- I do not greatly care;
So long as there are brown hills -- and a tree
Like a mad prophet in a land of dearth --
And I can lie and hear eternally
The vast monotonous breathing of the earth.
I have known hours, slow and golden-glowing,
Lovely with laughter and suffused with light,
O Lord, in such a time appoint my going,
When the hands clench, and the cold face grows white,
And the spark dies within the feeble brain,
Spilling its star-dust back to dust again.
Sonnets. V
by John Milton

Per certo i bei vostr'occhi Donna mia
Esser non puo che non fian lo mio sole
Si mi percuoton forte, come ci suole
Per l'arene di Libia chi s'invia,
Mentre un caldo vapor (ne senti pria)
Da quel lato si spinge ove mi duole,
Che forsi amanti nelle lor parole
Chiaman sospir; io non so che si sia:
Parte rinchiusa, e turbida si cela
Scosso mi il petto, e poi n'uscendo poco
Quivi d' attorno o s'agghiaccia, o s'ingiela;
Ma quanto a gli occhi giunge a trovar loco
Tutte le notti a me suol far piovose
Finche mia Alba rivien colma di rose.
Last Words To A Dumb Friend
by Thomas Hardy

Pet was never mourned as you,
Purrer of the spotless hue,
Plumy tail, and wistful gaze
While you humoured our queer ways,
Or outshrilled your morning call
Up the stairs and through the hall -
Foot suspended in its fall -
While, expectant, you would stand
Arched, to meet the stroking hand;
Till your way you chose to wend
Yonder, to your tragic end.
Never another pet for me!
Let your place all vacant be;
Better blankness day by day
Than companion torn away.
Better bid his memory fade,
Better blot each mark he made,
Selfishly escape distress
By contrived forgetfulness,
Than preserve his prints to make
Every morn and eve an ache.
From the chair whereon he sat
Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;
Rake his little pathways out
Mid the bushes roundabout;
Smooth away his talons' mark
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.
Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for his life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
His existence ruled by ours,
Should by crossing at a breath
Into safe and shielded death,
By the merely taking hence
Of his insignificance -
Loom as largened to the sense,
Shape as part, above man's will,
Of the Imperturbable.
As a prisoner, flight debarred,
Exercising in a yard,
Still retain I, troubled, shaken,
Mean estate, by him forsaken;
And this home, which scarcely took
Impress from his little look,
By his faring to the Dim
Grows all eloquent of him.
Housemate, I can think you still
Bounding to the window-sill,
Over which I vaguely see
Your small mound beneath the tree,
Showing in the autumn shade
That you moulder where you played.
October 2, 1904.
Epitaphs Ii. Perhaps Some Needful Service Of The State
by William Wordsworth

Perhaps some needful service of the State
Drew TITUS from the depth of studious bowers,
And doomed him to contend in faithless courts,
Where gold determines between right and wrong.
Yet did at length his loyalty of heart,
And his pure native genius, lead him back
To wait upon the bright and gracious Muses,
Whom he had early loved. And not in vain
Such course he held! Bologna's learned schools
Were gladdened by the Sage's voice, and hung
With fondness on those sweet Nestorian strains.
There pleasure crowned his days; and all his thoughts
A roseate fragrance breathed. O human life,
That never art secure from dolorous change!
Behold a high injunction suddenly
To Arno's side hath brought him, and he charmed
A Tuscan audience: but full soon was called
To the perpetual silence of the grave.
Mourn, Italy, the loss of him who stood
A Champion stedfast and invincible,
To quell the rage of literary War!
On Reading President Lincoln's Letter
by Hanford Lennox Gordon

To Horace Greeley, of date Aug. 22, 1862 "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it," etc.
Perish the power that, bowed to dust,
Still wields a tyrant's rod 
That dares not even then be just,
And leave the rest with God.
To Longfellow.
by Denis Florence MacCarthy

I.
Pensive within the Colosseum's walls
I stood with thee, O Poet of the West! - 
The day when each had been a welcome guest
In San Clemente's venerable halls: - 
Ah, with what pride my memory now recalls
That hour of hours, that flower of all the rest,
When with thy white beard falling on thy breast - 
That noble head, that well might serve as Paul's
In some divinest vision of the saint
By Raffael dreamed, I heard thee mourn the dead - 
The martyred host who fearless there, though faint,
Walked the rough road that up to Heaven's gate led:
These were the pictures Calderon loved to paint
In golden hues that here perchance have fled.
II.
Yet take the colder copy from my hand,
Not for its own but for THE MASTER'S sake, - 
Take it, as thou, returning home, wilt take
From that divinest soft Italian land
Fixed shadows of the Beautiful and Grand
In sunless pictures that the sun doth make - 
Reflections that may pleasant memories wake
Of all that Raffael touched, or Angelo planned: - 
As these may keep what memory else might lose,
So may this photograph of verse impart
An image, though without the native hues
Of Calderon's fire, and yet with Calderon's art,
Of what Thou lovest through a kindred Muse
That sings in heaven, yet nestles in the heart.
D. F. M. C.
Dublin, August 24th, 1869.
Faces
by Sara Teasdale

People that I meet and pass
In the city's broken roar,
Faces that I lose so soon
And have never found before,
Do you know how much you tell
In the meeting of our eyes,
How ashamed I am, and sad
To have pierced your poor disguise?
Secrets rushing without sound
Crying from your hiding places
Let me go, I cannot bear
The sorrow of the passing faces.
People in the restless street,
Can it be, oh can it be
In the meeting of our eyes
That you know as much of me?
The Morning Sun.
by Edward Shanks

Perhaps you sleep now, fifty miles to the south,
While I sit here and dream of you by night.
The thick soft blankets drawn about your mouth
Have made for you a nest of warm delight;
Your short crisp hair is thrown abroad and spilled
Upon the pillow's whiteness and your eyes
Are quiet and the round soft lids are filled
With sleep.
But I shall watch until sunrise
Creeps into chilly clouds and heavy air,
Across the lands where you sleep and I wake,
And I shall know the sun has seen you there,
Unmoving though the winter morning break.
Next, you will lift your hands and rub your eyes
And turn to sleep again but wake and start
And feel, half dreaming, with a dear surprise,
My hand in the sunbeam touching at your heart.