DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
The Rush To London
by Henry Lawson

You're off away to London now,
Where no one dare ignore you,
With Southern laurels on your brow,
And all the world before you.
But if you should return again,
Forgotten and unknowing,
Then one shall wait in wind and rain,
Where forty cheered you going.
You're off away to London, proved,
Where fair girls shall adore you;
The poor, plain face of one that loved
May never rise before you.
But if you should return again,
When young blood ceases flowing,
Then one shall wait in wind and rain,
Where forty cheered you going.
It may be carelessly you spoke
Of never more returning,
But sometimes in the London smoke,
You'll smell the gum leaves burning;
And think of how the grassy plain
Beyond the fog is flowing,
And one that waits in shine or rain,
Where forty cheered you going.
The Chimera
by Oliver Herford

You'd think a lion or a snake
Were quite enough one's nerves to shake;
But in this classic beast we find
A lion and a snake combined,
And, just as if that weren't enough,
A goat thrown in to make it tough.
Let scientists the breed pooh! pooh!
Come with me to some Social Zoo
And hear the bearded Lion bleat
Goat-like on patent-kidded feet,
Whose "Civil leer and damning praise"
The serpent's cloven tongue betrays.
Lo! lion, goat, and snake combined!
Thus Nature doth repeat her kind.
Song
by Hilaire Belloc

Inviting the influence of a young lady upon the opening year
You wear the morning like your dress
And are with mastery crown'd;
When as you walk your loveliness
Goes shining all around:
Upon your secret, smiling way
Such new contents were found,
The Dancing Loves made holiday
On that delightful ground.
Then summon April forth, and send
Commandment through the flowers;
About our woods your grace extend,
A queen of careless hours.
For O! not Vera veil'd in rain,
Nor Dian's sacred Ring,
With all her royal nymphs in train
Could so lead on the Spring.
You Were The Sort That Men Forget
by Thomas Hardy

You were the sort that men forget;
Though I - not yet! -
Perhaps not ever. Your slighted weakness
Adds to the strength of my regret!
You'd not the art - you never had
For good or bad -
To make men see how sweet your meaning,
Which, visible, had charmed them glad.
You would, by words inept let fall,
Offend them all,
Even if they saw your warm devotion
Would hold your life's blood at their call.
You lacked the eye to understand
Those friends offhand
Whose mode was crude, though whose dim purport
Outpriced the courtesies of the bland.
I am now the only being who
Remembers you
It may be. What a waste that Nature
Grudged soul so dear the art its due!
You'll Love Me Yet
by Robert Browning

You'll love me yet! and I can tarry
Your love's protracted growing:
June reared that bunch of flowers you carry
From seeds of April's sowing.
I plant a heartful now: some seed
At least is sure to strike,
And yield, what you'll not pluck indeed,
Not love, but, may be, like!
You'll look at least on love's remains,
A grave's one violet:
Your look? that pays a thousand pains.
What's death? You'll love me yet!
Peace In A Palace
by Alfred Noyes

"You were weeping in the night," said the Emperor,
"Weeping in your sleep, I am told."
"It was nothing but a dream," said the Empress;
But her face grew gray and old.
"You thought you saw our German God defeated?"
"Oh, no!" she said. "I saw no lightnings fall.
I dreamed of a whirlpool of green water,
Where something had gone down. That was all.
"All but the whimper of the sea gulls flying,
Endlessly round and round,
Waiting for the faces, the faces from the darkness,
The dreadful rising faces of the drowned.
"It was nothing but a dream," said the Empress.
"I thought I was walking on the sea;
And the foam rushed up in a wild smother,
And a crowd of little faces looked at me.
They were drowning! They were drowning," said the Empress,
"And they stretched their feeble arms to the sky;
But the worst was--they mistook me for their mother,
And cried as my children used to cry.
"Nothing but a whimper of the sea-gulls flying,
Endlessly round and round,
With the cruel yellow beaks that were waiting for the faces,
The little floating faces of the drowned."
"It was nothing but a dream," said the Emperor,
"So why should you weep, dear, eh?"--
"Oh, I saw the red letters on a life belt
That the green sea washed my way!"--
"What were they?" said the Emperor. "What were they?"--
"Some of them were hidden," said the Empress,
"But I plainly saw the L and the U!"
"In God's name, stop!" said the Emperor.
"You told me that it was not true!
"Told me that you dreamed of the sea gulls flying,
Endlessly round and round,
Waiting for the faces, and the eyes in the faces,
The eyes of the children that we drowned.
"Kiss me and forget it," said the Emperor,
"Dry your tears on the tassel of my sword.
I am going to offer peace to my people,
And abdicate, perhaps, as overlord.
I shall now take up My Cross as Count of Prussia--
Which is not a heavy burden, you'll agree.
Why, before the twenty million dead are rotten
There'll be yachting days again for you and me.
Cheer up!
It would mean a rope for anyone but Me."
"Oh, take care!" said the Empress. "They are flying,
Endlessly round and round.
They have finished with the faces, the dreadful little faces,
The little eyeless faces of the drowned."
You'd Entertain The Universe In Bed
by Charles Baudelaire

You'd entertain the universe in bed,
Foul woman; ennui makes you mean of soul.
To exercise your jaws at this strange sport
Each day you work a heart between your teeth.
Your eyes, illuminated like boutiques
Or blazing stanchions at a public fair,
Use haughtily a power not their own,
With no awareness of their beauty's law.
Blind, deaf machine, fertile in cruelties!
Valuable tool, that drinks the whole world's blood,
Why are you not ashamed, how have you not
In mirrors seen your many charms turn pale?
The magnitude of all your evil schemes,
Has this, then, never shrunk your heart with fear,
When Nature, mighty in her secret plans,
Makes use of you, o woman! queen of sins!
Of you, vile beast - to mould a genius?
O filthy grandeur! o sublime disgrace!
The Meditation Of The Old Fisherman
by William Butler Yeats

You waves, though you dance by my feet like children
at play,
Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and
you dart;
In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves
were more gay,
i(When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.)
The herring are not in the tides as they were of old;
My sorrow! for many a creak gave the creel in the-cart
That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,
i(When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.)
And ah, you proud maiden, you are not so fair when
his oar
Is heard on the water, as they were, the proud and apart,
Who paced in the eve by the nets on the pebbly shore,
i(When) I i(was) a boy i(with never) a i(crack in my heart.)
Five Criticisms - IV.
by Alfred Noyes

(On Certain Realists.)
You with the quick sardonic eye
For all the mockeries of life,
Beware, in this dark masque of things that seem,
Lest even that tragic irony,
Which you discern in this our mortal strife,
Trick you and trap you, also, with a dream.
Last night I saw a dead man borne along
The city streets, passing a boisterous throng
That never ceased to laugh and shout and dance:
And yet, and yet,
For all the poison bitter minds might brew
From themes like this, I knew
That the stern Truth would not permit her glance
Thus to be foiled by flying straws of chance,
For her keen eyes on deeper skies are set,
And laws that tragic ironists forget.
She saw the dead man's life, from birth to death,--
All that he knew of love and sin and pain,
Success and failure (not as this world sees),
His doubts, his passions, inner loss and gain,
And borne on darker tides of constant law
Beyond the margin of this life she saw
All that had left his body with the breath.
These things, to her, were still realities.
If any mourned for him unseen,
She saw them, too.
If none, she'd not pretend
His clay were colder, or his God less true,
Or that his grave, at length, would be less green.
She'd not deny
The boundless depths of her eternal sky
Brooding above a boundless universe,
Because he seemed to man's unseeing eye
Going a little further to fare worse;
Nor would she assume he lacked that unseen friend
Whom even the tragic ironists declare
Were better than the seen, in his last end.
Oh, then, beware, beware,
Lest in the strong name of "reality"
You mock yourselves anew with shapes of air,
Lest it be you, agnostics, who re-write
The fettering creeds of night,
Affirm you know your own Unknowable,
And lock the wing'd soul in a new hell;
Lest it be you, lip-worshippers of Truth,
Who break the heart of youth;
Lest it be you, the realists, who fight
With shadows, and forget your own pure light;
Lest it be you who, with a little shroud
Snatched from the sightless faces of the dead,
Hoodwink the world, and keep the mourner bowed
In dust, real dust, with stones, real stones, for bread;
Lest, as you look one eighth of an inch beneath
The yellow skin of death,
You dream yourselves discoverers of the skull
That old memento mori of our faith;
Lest it be you who hunt a flying wraith
Through this dissolving stuff of hill and cloud;
Lest it be you, who, at the last, annul
Your covenant with your kind;
Lest it be you who darken heart and mind,
Sell the strong soul in bondage to a dream,
And fetter us once more to things that seem.
Juanita
by Joaquin Miller

You will come, my bird, Bonita?
Come! For I by steep and stone
Have built such nest for you, Juanita,
As not eagle bird hath known.
Rugged! Rugged as Parnassus!
Rude, as all roads I have trod 
Yet are steeps and stone-strewn passes
Smooth o'er-head, and nearest God.
Here black thunders of my ca'on
Shake its walls in Titan wars!
Here white sea-born clouds companion
With such peaks as know the stars!
Here madrona, manzanita 
Here the snarling chaparral
House and hang o'er steeps, Juanita,
Where the gaunt wolf loved to dwell!
Dear, I took these trackless masses
Fresh from Him who fashioned them;
Wrought in rock, and hewed fair passes,
Flower set, as sets a gem.
Aye, I built in woe. God willed it;
Woe that passeth ghosts of guilt;
Yet I built as His birds builded 
Builded, singing as I built.
All is finished! Roads of flowers
Wait your loyal little feet.
All completed? Nay, the hours
Till you come are incomplete.
Steep below me lies the valley,
Deep below me lies the town,
Where great sea-ships ride and rally,
And the world walks up and down.
O, the sea of lights far streaming
When the thousand flags are furled 
When the gleaming bay lies dreaming
As it duplicates the world!
You will come, my dearest, truest?
Come, my sovereign queen of ten;
My blue skies will then be bluest;
My white rose be whitest then:
Then the song! Ah, then the sabre
Flashing up the walls of night!
Hate of wrong and love of neighbor 
Rhymes of battle for the Right!
Sonnets: Idea XI
by Michael Drayton

You're not alone when you are still alone;
O God! from you that I could private be!
Since you one were, I never since was one;
Since you in me, myself since out of me.
Transported from myself into your being,
Though either distant, present yet to either;
Senseless with too much joy, each other seeing;
And only absent when we are together.
Give me my self, and take your self again!
Devise some means but how I may forsake you!
So much is mine that doth with you remain,
That taking what is mine, with me I take you.
You do bewitch me! O that I could fly
From my self you, or from your own self I!
Lighting The Fire
by John Frederick Freeman

You were a gipsy as you bent
Your dark hair over the black grate.
Hardly the west light above the hill
Showed your shadow, crooked and still.
The bellows hissed, and one bright spark
Deepened the hasty dark.
The bellows hissed, and the old smell
Crept on the air of smoking peat,
And round the spark a bubbling flame
Grew bright and loud. Sweeping the gloom
Lunatic shadows fled and came
Whirling about the room.
Then as you raised your head I saw
In the clear light of the bubbling fire
Your dark hair all lined with the gray
Sprinkled by years and sorrow and pain ...
Till as the bellows idle lay
Shadow swept back again.
The Temple Dancing Girl
by Laurence Hope (Adela Florence Cory Nicolson)

You will be mine; those lightly dancing feet,
Falling as softly on the careless street
As the wind-loosened petals of a flower,
Will bring you here, at the Appointed Hour.
And all the Temple's little links and laws
Will not for long protect your loveliness.
I have a stronger force to aid my cause,
Nature's great Law, to love and to possess!
Throughout those sleepless watches, when I lay
Wakeful, desiring what I might not see,
I knew (it helped those hours, from dusk to day),
In this one thing, Fate would be kind to me.
You will consent, through all my veins like wine
This prescience flows; your lips meet mine above,
Your clear soft eyes look upward into mine
Dim in a silent ecstasy of love.
The clustered softness of your waving hair,
That curious paleness which enchants me so,
And all your delicate strength and youthful air,
Destiny will compel you to bestow!
Refuse, withdraw, and hesitate awhile,
Your young reluctance does but fan the flame;
My partner, Love, waits, with a tender smile,
Who play against him play a losing game.
I, strong in nothing else, have strength in this,
The subtlest, most resistless, force we know
Is aiding me; and you must stoop and kiss:
The genius of the race will have it so!
Yet, make it not too long, nor too intense
My thirst; lest I should break beneath the strain,
And the worn nerves, and over-wearied sense,
Enjoy not what they spent themselves to gain.
Lest, in the hour when you consent to share
That human passion Beauty makes divine,
I, over worn, should find you over fair,
Lest I should die before I make you mine.
You will consent, those slim, reluctant feet,
Falling as lightly on the careless street
As the white petals of a wind-worn flower,
Will bring you here, at the Appointed Hour.
Will
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

You will be what you will to be;
Let failure find its false content
In that poor word "environment,"
But spirit scorns it, and is free,
It masters time, it conquers space,
It cows that boastful trickster Chance,
And bids the tyrant Circumstance
Uncrown and fill a servant's place.
The human Will, that force unseen,
The offspring of a deathless Soul,
Can hew the way to any goal,
Though walls of granite intervene.
Be not impatient in delay,
But wait as one who understands;
When spirit rises and commands,
The gods are ready to obey.
The river seeking for the sea
Confronts the dam and precipice,
Yet knows it cannot fail or miss;
You will be what you will to be!
Atonement.
by Charles Hamilton Musgrove

You were a red rose then, I know,
Red as her wine--yea, redder still,--
Say rather her blood; and ages ago
(You know how destiny hath its will)
I placed you deep in her gorgeous hair,
And left you to wither there.
Wine and blood and a red, red rose,--
Feast and song and a long, long sleep;--
And which of us dreamed at the drama's close
That the unforgetful years would keep
Our sin and their vengeance laid away
As a gift to this bitter day?
Now you are white as the mountain snow,
White as the hand that I fold you in,
And none but the angels of God may know
That either has once been stained with sin;
It was blood and wine in the old, old years,
But now it is only tears.
And so at the end of our several ways
We have met once more, and the truth is clear
That our heart's own blood no surer pays
For our sin in the past than atonement here;
But the end has come as God knows best:
Now we shall be at rest.
The Exposed Nest
by Robert Lee Frost

You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
I the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,
If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But 'twas no make-believe with you today,
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,
Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clovers.
'Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasking flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
You wanted to restore them to their right
Of something interposed between their sight
And too much world at once, could means be found.
The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother-bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might out meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven't any memory, have you?, 
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.
Expectation
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

You 'll be wonderin' whut 's de reason
I 's a grinnin' all de time,
An' I guess you t'ink my sperits
Mus' be feelin' mighty prime.
Well, I 'fess up, I is tickled
As a puppy at his paws.
But you need n't think I's crazy,
I ain' laffin' 'dout a cause.
You's a wonderin' too, I reckon,
Why I does n't seem to eat,
An' I notice you a lookin'
Lak you felt completely beat
When I 'fuse to tek de bacon,
An' don' settle on de ham.
Don' you feel no feah erbout me,
Jes' keep eatin', an' be ca'm.
Fu' I's waitin' an' I's watchin'
'Bout a little t'ing I see--
D' othah night I's out a walkin'
An' I passed a 'simmon tree.
Now I's whettin' up my hongry,
An' I's laffin' fit to kill,
Fu' de fros' done turned de 'simmons,
An' de possum 's eat his fill.
He done go'ged hisse'f owdacious,
An' he stayin' by de tree!
Don' you know, ol' Mistah Possum
Dat you gittin' fat fu' me?
'T ain't no use to try to 'spute it,
'Case I knows you's gittin' sweet
Wif dat 'simmon flavoh thoo you,
So I's waitin' fu' yo' meat.
An' some ebenin' me an Towsah
Gwine to come an' mek a call,
We jes' drap in onexpected
Fu' to shek yo' han', dat's all.
Oh, I knows dat you 'll be tickled,
Seems lak I kin see you smile,
So pu'haps I mought pu'suade you
Fu' to visit us a while.
Paul Verlaine
by Ernest Christopher Dowson

You would have understood me, had you waited;
I could have loved you, dear! as well as he:
Had we not been impatient, dear! and fated
Always to disagree.
What is the use of speech? Silence were fitter:
Lest we should still be wishing things unsaid.
Though all the words we ever spake were bitter,
Shall I reproach you dead?
Nay, let this earth, your portion, likewise cover
All the old anger, setting us apart:
Always, in all, in truth was I your lover;
Always, I held your heart.
I have met other women who were tender,
As you were cold, dear! with a grace as rare.
Think you, I turned to them, or made surrender,
I who had found you fair?
Had we been patient, dear! ah, had you waited,
I had fought death for you, better than he:
But from the very first, dear! we were fated
Always to disagree.
Late, late, I come to you, now death discloses
Love that in life was not to be our part:
On your low lying mound between the roses,
Sadly I cast my heart.
I would not waken you: nay! this is fitter;
Death and the darkness give you unto me;
Here we who loved so, were so cold and bitter,
Hardly can disagree.
Indignation" Jones
by Edgar Lee Masters

You would not believe, would you
That I came from good Welsh stock?
That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?
And of more direct lineage than the
New Englanders And Virginians of Spoon River?
You would not believe that I had been to school
And read some books.
You saw me only as a run-down man
With matted hair and beard
And ragged clothes.
Sometimes a man's life turns into a cancer
From being bruised and continually bruised,
And swells into a purplish mass
Like growths on stalks of corn.
Here was I, a carpenter, mired in a bog of life
Into which I walked, thinking it was a meadow,
With a slattern for a wife, and poor Minerva, my daughter,
Whom you tormented and drove to death.
So I crept, crept, like a snail through the days
Of my life.
No more you hear my footsteps in the morning,
Resounding on the hollow sidewalk
Going to the grocery store for a little corn meal
And a nickel's worth of bacon.
The Daisies.
by Kate Greenaway

You very fine Miss Molly,
What will the daisies say,
If you carry home so many
Of their little friends to-day?
Perhaps you take a sister,
Perhaps you take a brother,
Or two little daisies who
Were fond of one another.
You Will Tell Me Where Is Conrad?
by William McKendree Carleton

[From Arthur Selwyn's Note-book.]
Let me a moment indite
Scenes that I witnessed one night:
["You Will Tell Me Where Is Conrad?"]
"You will tell me where is Conrad?" said an old man, bent and gray,
While the flames were wildly dancing, and the walls were giving way.
"I haf heard some ones was buried - underneath the ruins fell;
He was in de topmost story - ach, mein Gott! I luf him well!
"I will tell you how you knew him: he had full and laughing eye,
And his face was smooth and smiling - and he was too young to die.
"Hair he had like clouds at sunset when anodher day is done,
And I luf him - how I luf him! and he is mein only son.
"Say, Policeman, tell me truly that this young man you did see,
And I all the money gif you, such as I could bring with me.
"Tell me that he anxious acted - that he hunted far and long,
Like as children would be calling for their fadher in a throng;
"Or he wounded was, pray tell me - in the hospital to lie? - 
I will just now hasten to him, and I not will let him die!
"Tell me - oh, you must not told me - dead you haf my Conrad see?
Yet if so is I can stand that - I did long a soldier be.
"Only - Death, we do not fear him when we hear the bullets sing,
But to haf my boy killed this way is a rather different thing.
"Only - that his poor old mudher, she waits home all full of fear,
And I cannot there be going, till I take good news from here!
"Young he was when we did bring him from the Rhine land o'er the sea;
I did lif for her and Conrad - she did lif for him and me.
"Other ones we bring not with us: Gott he says, 'These more be mine;'
And we left them all a-sleeping 'mong the vineyards of the Rhine.
"He haf not a cross word gif us - he haf luf us every day,
And if he to-night comes home not, 'tis the first that he's away.
"Let me to that fire, Policeman! I care what for walls or brand?
Maybe he in there be living - reaching for his fadher's hand!
"Let me past, I say, Policeman! I haf work there to be done!
Let go me or I will strike you! - is it that you haf no son?"
*             *             *             *             *
Still the flames were like a furnace, and the walls were crashing loud,
And the old man, held in safety, fainted 'mid the trembling crowd.
And the mother watched and wondered, with her great eyes scarcely wet;
But, half dazed amid her sorrow, waits for Conrad even yet.
Slain
by Thomas William Hodgson Crosland

You who are still and white
And cold like stone;
For whom the unfailing light
Is spent and done;
For whom no more the breath
Of dawn, nor evenfall
Nor Spring, nor love, nor death
Matter at all;
Who were so strong and young
And brave and wise,
And on the dark are flung
With darkened eyes;
End Of The Year 1912
by Thomas Hardy

You were here at his young beginning,
You are not here at his aged end;
Off he coaxed you from Life's mad spinning,
Lest you should see his form extend
Shivering, sighing,
Slowly dying,
And a tear on him expend.
So it comes that we stand lonely
In the star-lit avenue,
Dropping broken lipwords only,
For we hear no songs from you,
Such as flew here
For the new year
Once, while six bells swung thereto.