DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
Senlin, A Biography: Part 02: His Futile Preoccupations - 08
by Conrad Potter Aiken

The pale blue gloom of evening comes
Among the phantom forests and walls
With a mournful and rythmic sound of drums.
My heart is disturbed with a sound of myriad throbbing,
Persuasive and sinister, near and far:
In the blue evening of my heart
I hear the thrum of the evening star.
My work is uncompleted; and yet I hurry,
Hearing the whispered pulsing of those drums,
To enter the luminous walls and woods of night.
It is the eternal mistress of the world
Who shakes these drums for my delight.
Listen! the drums of the leaves, the drums of the dust,
The delicious quivering of this air!
I will leave my work unfinished, and I will go
With ringing and certain step through the laughter of chaos
To the one small room in the void I know.
Yesterday it was there,
Will I find it tonight once more when I climb the stair?
The drums of the street beat swift and soft:
In the blue evening of my heart
I hear the throb of the bridal star.
It weaves deliciously in my brain
A tyrannous melody of her:
Hands in sunlight, threads of rain
Against a weeping face that fades,
Snow on a blackened window-pane;
Fire, in a dusk of hair entangled;
Flesh, more delicate than fruit;
And a voice that searches quivering nerves
For a string to mute.
My life is uncompleted: and yet I hurry
Among the tinkling forests and walls of evening
To a certain fragrant room.
Who is it that dances there, to a beating of drums,
While stars on a grey sea bud and bloom?
She stands at the top of the stair,
With the lamplight on her hair.
I will walk through the snarling of streams of space
And climb the long steps carved from wind
And rise once more towards her face.
Listen! the drums of the drowsy trees
Beating our nuptial ecstasies!
Music spins from the heart of silence
And twirls me softly upon the air:
It takes my hand and whispers to me:
It draws the web of the moonlight down.
There are hands, it says, as cool as snow,
The hands of the Venus of the sea;
There are waves of sound in a mermaid-cave;
Come, then, come with me!
The flesh of the sea-rose new and cool,
The wavering image of her who comes
At dusk by a blue sea-pool.
Whispers upon the haunted air,
Whisper of foam-white arm and thigh;
And a shower of delicate lights blown down
Fro the laughing sky! . . .
Music spins from a far-off room.
Do you remember, it seems to say,
The mouth that smiled, beneath your mouth,
And kissed you . . . yesterday?
It is your own flesh waits for you.
Come! you are incomplete! . . .
The drums of the universe once more
Morosely beat.
It is the harlot of the world
Who clashes the leaves like ghostly drums
And disturbs the solitude of my heart
As evening comes!
I leave my work once more and walk
Along a street that sways in the wind.
I leave these stones, and walk once more
Along infinity's shore.
I climb the golden-laddered stair;
Among the stars in the void I climb:
I ascend the golden-laddered hair
Of the harlot-queen of time:
She laughs from a window in the sky,
Her white arms downward reach to me!
We are the universe that spins
In a dim ethereal sea.
The Fire
by Lola Ridge

The old men of the world have made a fire
To warm their trembling hands.
They poke the young men in.
The young men burn like withes.
If one run a little way,
The old men are wrath.
They catch him and bind him and throw him again to the flames.
Green withes burn slow...
And the smoke of the young men's torment
Rises round and sheer as the trunk of a pillared oak,
And the darkness thereof spreads over the sky....
Green withes burn slow...
And the old men of the world sit round the fire
And rub their hands....
But the smoke of the young men's torment
Ascends up for ever and ever.
My Dream.
by William Schwenck Gilbert

The other night, from cares exempt,
I slept and what d'you think I dreamt?
I dreamt that somehow I had come
To dwell in Topsy-Turveydom -
Where vice is virtue virtue, vice:
Where nice is nasty nasty, nice:
Where right is wrong and wrong is right -
Where white is black and black is white.
Where babies, much to their surprise,
Are born astonishingly wise;
With every Science on their lips,
And Art at all their finger-tips.
For, as their nurses dandle them
They crow binomial theorem,
With views (it seems absurd to us)
On differential calculus.
But though a babe, as I have said,
Is born with learning in his head,
He must forget it, if he can,
Before he calls himself a man.
For that which we call folly here,
Is wisdom in that favoured sphere;
The wisdom we so highly prize
Is blatant folly in their eyes.
A boy, if he would push his way,
Must learn some nonsense every day;
And cut, to carry out this view,
His wisdom teeth and wisdom too.
Historians burn their midnight oils,
Intent on giant-killers' toils;
And sages close their aged eyes
To other sages' lullabies.
Our magistrates, in duty bound,
Commit all robbers who are found;
But there the Beaks (so people said)
Commit all robberies instead.
Our Judges, pure and wise in tone,
Know crime from theory alone,
And glean the motives of a thief
From books and popular belief.
But there, a Judge who wants to prime
His mind with true ideas of crime,
Derives them from the common sense
Of practical experience.
Policemen march all folks away
Who practise virtue every day -
Of course, I mean to say, you know,
What we call virtue here below.
For only scoundrels dare to do
What we consider just and true,
And only good men do, in fact,
What we should think a dirty act.
But strangest of these social twirls,
The girls are boys the boys are girls!
The men are women, too but then,
Per contra, women all are men.
To one who to tradition clings
This seems an awkward state of things,
But if to think it out you try,
It doesn't really signify.
With them, as surely as can be,
A sailor should be sick at sea,
And not a passenger may sail
Who cannot smoke right through a gale.
A soldier (save by rarest luck)
Is always shot for showing pluck
(That is, if others can be found
With pluck enough to fire a round).
"How strange!" I said to one I saw;
"You quite upset our every law.
However can you get along
So systematically wrong?"
"Dear me!" my mad informant said,
"Have you no eyes within your head?
You sneer when you your hat should doff:
Why, we begin where you leave off!
"Your wisest men are very far
Less learned than our babies are!"
I mused awhile and then, oh me!
I framed this brilliant repartee:
"Although your babes are wiser far
Than our most valued sages are,
Your sages, with their toys and cots,
Are duller than our idiots!"
But this remark, I grieve to state,
Came just a little bit too late
For as I framed it in my head,
I woke and found myself in bed.
Still I could wish that, 'stead of here,
My lot were in that favoured sphere! -
Where greatest fools bear off the bell
I ought to do extremely well.
Cumberland
by Walter De La Mare

The old, old King of Cumberland
Awoke with bristling beard - 
Crouched listening in the darkness
To a sound that he had heard.
He leaned upon his foursquare bed,
His thumb beneath his chin;
Hearkening after that which had stirred
The dream that he was in.
The old, old King of Cumberland
Muttered, "Twas not the sea,
Gushing upon Shlievlisskin rocks,
That wakened me.
"Thunder from midmost night it was not;
For yonder at the bars
Burn to their summer setting her
Clear constellated stars."
The old, old King of Cumberland
Mused yet, "Rats ever did
Rove from their holes, and clink my spurs,
And gnaw my coverlid.
"Oft hath a little passing breeze
Along this valance stirred;
But in this stagnant calm 'twas not
The wind I heard.
"Some keener, stranger, quieter, closer
Voice it was me woke...."
And silence, like a billow, drowned
The word he spoke.
His chamber walls were cloaked with dark;
Shadow did thickly brood,
And in the vague, all-listening night
A presence stood....
Sudden a gigantic hand he thrust
Into his bosom cold,
Where now no surging restless beat
Its long tale told:
Swept on him then, as there he sate,
Terror icy chill;
'Twas silence that had him awoke - 
His heart stood still.
The First Surveyor
by Banjo Paterson (Andrew Barton)

"The opening of the railway line!, the Governor and all!
With flags and banners down the street, a banquet and a ball.
Hark to 'em at the station now! They're raising cheer on cheer!
'The man who brought the railway through, our friend the engineer.'
They cheer his pluck and enterprise and engineering skill!
'Twas my old husband found the pass behind that big red hill.
Before the engineer was born we'd settled with our stock
Behind that great big mountain chain, a line of range and rock,
A line that kept us starving there in weary weeks of drought,
With ne'er a track across the range to let the cattle out.
"'Twas then, with horses starved and weak and scarcely fit to crawl,
My husband went to find a way across the rocky wall.
He vanished in the wilderness, God knows where he was gone,
He hunted till his food gave out, but still he battled on.
His horses strayed ('twas well they did), they made towards the grass,
And down behind that big red hill they found an easy pass.
"He followed up and blazed the trees, to show the safest track,
Then drew his belt another hole and turned and started back.
His horses died, just one pulled through with nothing much to spare;
God bless the beast that brought him home, the old white Arab mare!
We drove the cattle through the hills, along the new-found way,
And this was our first camping-ground, just where I live today.
"Then others came across the range and built the township here,
And then there came the railway line and this young engineer;
He drove about with tents and traps, a cook to cook his meals,
A bath to wash himself at night, a chain-man at his heels.
And that was all the pluck and skill for which he's cheered and praised,
For after all he took the track, the same my husband blazed!
"My poor old husband, dead and gone with never a feast nor cheer;
He's buried by the railway line!, I wonder can he hear
When by the very track he marked, and close to where he's laid,
The cattle trains go roaring down the one-in-thirty grade.
I wonder does he hear them pass, and can he see the sight
When, whistling shrill, the fast express goes flaming by at night.
"I think 'twould comfort him to know there's someone left to care;
I'll take some things this very night and hold a banquet there,
The hard old fare we've often shared together, him and me,
Some damper and a bite of beef, a pannikin of tea:
We'll do without the bands and flags, the speeches and the fuss,
We know who ought to get the cheers, and that's enough for us.
"What's that? They wish that I'd come down, the oldest settler here!
Present me to the Governor and that young engineer!
Well, just you tell his Excellence, and put the thing polite,
I'm sorry, but I can't come down, I'm dining out tonight!"
The Bracelet Of Grass
by William Vaughn Moody

The opal heart of afternoon
Was clouding on to throbs of storm,
Ashen within the ardent west
The lips of thunder muttered harm,
And as a bubble like to break
Hung heaven's trembling amethyst,
When with the sedge-grass by the lake
I braceleted her wrist.
And when the ribbon grass was tied,
Sad with the happiness we planned,
Palm linked in palm we stood awhile
And watched the raindrops dot the sand;
Until the anger of the breeze
Chid all the lake's bright breathing down,
And ravished all the radiancies
From her deep eyes of brown.
We gazed from shelter on the storm,
And through our hearts swept ghostly pain
To see the shards of day sweep past,
Broken, and none might mend again.
Broken, that none shall ever mend;
Loosened, that none shall ever tie.
O the wind and the wind, will it never end?
O the sweeping past of the ruined sky!
To Lida.
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The only one whom, Lida, thou canst love,
Thou claim'st, and rightly claim'st, for only thee;
He too is wholly thine; since doomed to rove
Far from thee, in life's turmoils nought I see
Save a thin veil, through which thy form I view,
As though in clouds; with kindly smile and true,
It cheers me, like the stars eterne that gleam
Across the northern-lights' far-flick'ring beam.
The Old Retired Sea Captain.
by James Whitcomb Riley

The old sea captain has sailed the seas
So long, that the waves at mirth,
Or the waves gone wild, and the crests of these,
Were as near playmates from birth:
He has loved both the storm and the calm, because
They seemed as his brothers twain, - 
The flapping sail was his soul's applause,
And his rapture, the roaring main.
But now - like a battered hulk seems he,
Cast high on a foreign strand,
Though he feels "in port," as it need must be,
And the stay of a daughter's hand - 
Yet ever the round of the listless hours, - 
His pipe, in the languid air - 
The grass, the trees, and the garden flowers,
And the strange earth everywhere!
And so betimes he is restless here
In this little inland town,
With never a wing in the atmosphere
But the wind-mill's, up and down;
His daughter's home in this peaceful vale,
And his grandchild 'twixt his knees - 
But never the hail of a passing sail,
Nor the surge of the angry seas!
He quits his pipe, and he snaps its neck - 
Would speak, though he coughs instead,
Then paces the porch like a quarter-deck
With a reeling mast o'erhead!
Ho! the old sea captain's cheeks glow warm,
And his eyes gleam grim and weird,
As he mutters about, like a thunder-storm,
In the cloud of his beetling beard.
Iron Wine
by Lola Ridge

The ore in the crucible is pungent, smelling like acrid wine,
It is dusky red, like the ebb of poppies,
And purple, like the blood of elderberries.
Surely it is a strong wine - juice distilled of the fierce iron.
I am drunk of its fumes.
I feel its fiery flux
Diffusing, permeating,
Working some strange alchemy...
So that I turn aside from the goodly board,
So that I look askance upon the common cup,
And from the mouths of crucibles
Suck forth the acrid sap.
A Young Wife
by D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Richards)

The pain of loving you
Is almost more than I can bear.
I walk in fear of you.
The darkness starts up where
You stand, and the night comes through
Your eyes when you look at me.
Ah never before did I see
The shadows that live in the sun!
Now every tall glad tree
Turns round its back to the sun
And looks down on the ground, to see
The shadow it used to shun.
At the foot of each glowing thing
A night lies looking up.
Oh, and I want to sing
And dance, but I can't lift up
My eyes from the shadows: dark
They lie spilt round the cup.
What is it? - Hark
The faint fine seethe in the air!
Like the seething sound in a shell!
It is death still seething where
The wild-flower shakes its bell
And the sky lark twinkles blue - 
The pain of loving you
Is almost more than I can bear.
City The Insects Invade
by Paul Cameron Brown

"From the indigo straits to Ossian's seas, on pink and orange sands washed by the vinous sky, crystal boulevards have just arisen and crossed, immoderately inhabitedby poor young families who get their food at the green grocers. Nothing rich-the city." Arthur Rimbaud
The old man sleeps with his weeping. Another old one pauses with her cats on a fire escape while nursing a sore like a precious stone. A garbage can is an herbivore grazing on stalks of ringworm. Vermin are the pool sharks of this brothel polishing off the tenements' fur lined rails.
At last, the skid of tires tears a hole in the river bank. Sand-fleas and blowflies become nightriders marauding a new turf of godzilla cars. An urchin dangles his stolen wristwatch like a fish in a bottle while shoals of centipedes make a beeline in a poseidon stampede. Filthy rags are prayer cakes left over from the last sabbat and become holed coffins for those still searching for involvement.
Islands drift into protoplasm atolls as the city stalks itself. Cockroaches are the plumbers of eternity. Rapid fire legs sidestep the etchings of industrious ants while silverfish are the boatmen trouncing human oars. Living is a Stegasorous swinging its tail.
Scraps are inviting guests as insects lord over a habitat free of blight and homuncular stain.
The Only Ghost I Ever Saw
by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

The only ghost I ever saw
Was dressed in mechlin, -- so;
He wore no sandal on his foot,
And stepped like flakes of snow.
His gait was soundless, like the bird,
But rapid, like the roe;
His fashions quaint, mosaic,
Or, haply, mistletoe.
His conversation seldom,
His laughter like the breeze
That dies away in dimples
Among the pensive trees.
Our interview was transient,--
Of me, himself was shy;
And God forbid I look behind
Since that appalling day!
A Toast To Wilkie Collins
by Oliver Wendell Holmes

The painter's and the poet's fame
Shed their twinned lustre round his name,
To gild our story-teller's art,
Where each in turn must play his part.
What scenes from Wilkie's pencil sprung,
The minstrel saw but left unsung!
What shapes the pen of Collins drew,
No painter clad in living hue!
But on our artist's shadowy screen
A stranger miracle is seen
Than priest unveils or pilgrim seeks, - 
The poem breathes, the picture speaks!
And so his double name comes true,
They christened better than they knew,
And Art proclaims him twice her son, - 
Painter and poet, both in one!
Outback
by Henry Lawson

The old year went, and the new returned, in the withering weeks of drought,
The cheque was spent that the shearer earned, and the sheds were all cut out;
The publican's words were short and few, and the publican's looks were black,
And the time had come, as the shearer knew, to carry his swag Out Back.
For time means tucker, and tramp you must, where the scrubs and plains are wide,
With seldom a track that a man can trust, or a mountain peak to guide;
All day long in the dust and heat, when summer is on the track,
With stinted stomachs and blistered feet, they carry their swags Out Back.
He tramped away from the shanty there, when the days were long and hot,
With never a soul to know or care if he died on the track or not.
The poor of the city have friends in woe, no matter how much they lack,
But only God and the swagmen know how a poor man fares Out Back.
He begged his way on the parched Paroo and the Warrego tracks once more,
And lived like a dog, as the swagmen do, till the Western stations shore;
But men were many, and sheds were full, for work in the town was slack,
The traveller never got hands in wool, though he tramped for a year Out Back.
In stifling noons when his back was wrung by its load, and the air seemed dead,
And the water warmed in the bag that hung to his aching arm like lead,
Or in times of flood, when plains were seas, and the scrubs were cold and black,
He ploughed in mud to his trembling knees, and paid for his sins Out Back.
He blamed himself in the year `Too Late', in the heaviest hours of life,
'Twas little he dreamed that a shearing-mate had care of his home and wife;
There are times when wrongs from your kindred come, and treacherous tongues attack,
When a man is better away from home, and dead to the world, Out Back.
And dirty and careless and old he wore, as his lamp of hope grew dim;
He tramped for years till the swag he bore seemed part of himself to him.
As a bullock drags in the sandy ruts, he followed the dreary track,
With never a thought but to reach the huts when the sun went down Out Back.
It chanced one day, when the north wind blew in his face like a furnace-breath,
He left the track for a tank he knew, 'twas a short-cut to his death;
For the bed of the tank was hard and dry, and crossed with many a crack,
And, oh! it's a terrible thing to die of thirst in the scrub Out Back.
A drover came, but the fringe of law was eastward many a mile;
He never reported the thing he saw, for it was not worth his while.
The tanks are full and the grass is high in the mulga off the track,
Where the bleaching bones of a white man lie by his mouldering swag Out Back.
For time means tucker, and tramp they must, where the plains and scrubs are wide,
With seldom a track that a man can trust, or a mountain peak to guide;
All day long in the flies and heat the men of the outside track
With stinted stomachs and blistered feet must carry their swags Out Back.
Adelgitha
by Thomas Campbell

The ordeal's fatal trumpet sounded,
And sad pale Adelgitha came,
When forth a valiant champion bounded,
And slew the slanderer of her fame.
She wept, delivered from her danger;
But when he knelt to claim her glove
"Seek not!" she cried, "oh, gallant stranger,
For hapless Adelgitha's love.
For he is dead and in a foreign land
Whose arm should now have set me free;
And I must wear the willow garland
For him that's dead, or false to me."
"Nay! say not that his faith is tainted!"
He raised his visor. At the sight
She fell into his arms and fainted;
It was indeed her one true knight!
His Comfort.
by Robert Herrick

The only comfort of my life
Is, that I never yet had wife;
Nor will hereafter; since I know
Who weds, o'er-buys his weal with woe
Sestina III.
by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch)

L' aere gravato, e l' importuna nebbia.
HE COMPARES LAURA TO WINTER, AND FORESEES THAT SHE WILL ALWAYS BE THE SAME.
The overcharged air, the impending cloud,
Compress'd together by impetuous winds,
Must presently discharge themselves in rain;
Already as of crystal are the streams,
And, for the fine grass late that clothed the vales,
Is nothing now but the hoar frost and ice.
And I, within my heart, more cold than ice,
Of heavy thoughts have such a hovering cloud,
As sometimes rears itself in these our vales,
Lowly, and landlock'd against amorous winds,
Environ'd everywhere with stagnant streams,
When falls from soft'ning heaven the smaller rain.
Lasts but a brief while every heavy rain;
And summer melts away the snows and ice,
When proudly roll th' accumulated streams:
Nor ever hid the heavens so thick a cloud,
Which, overtaken by the furious winds,
Fled not from the first hills and quiet vales.
But ah! what profit me the flowering vales?
Alike I mourn in sunshine and in rain,
Suffering the same in warm and wintry winds;
For only then my lady shall want ice
At heart, and on her brow th' accustom'd cloud,
When dry shall be the seas, the lakes, and streams.
While to the sea descend the mountain streams,
As long as wild beasts love umbrageous vales,
O'er those bright eyes shall hang th' unfriendly cloud
My own that moistens with continual rain;
And in that lovely breast be harden'd ice
Which forces still from mine so dolorous winds.
Yet well ought I to pardon all the winds
But for the love of one, that 'mid two streams
Shut me among bright verdure and pure ice;
So that I pictured then in thousand vales
The shade wherein I was, which heat or rain
Esteemeth not, nor sound of broken cloud.
But fled not ever cloud before the winds,
As I that day: nor ever streams with rain
Nor ice, when April's sun opens the vales.
MACGREGOR.
To William E. Channing
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The pages of thy book I read,
And as I closed each one,
My heart, responding, ever said,
"Servant of God! well done!"
Well done!    Thy words are great and bold;
At times they seem to me,
Like Luther's, in the days of old,
Half-battles for the free.
Go on, until this land revokes
The old and chartered Lie,
The feudal curse, whose whips and yokes
Insult humanity.
A voice is ever at thy side
Speaking in tones of might,
Like the prophetic voice, that cried
To John in Patmos, "Write!"
Write! and tell out this bloody tale;
Record this dire eclipse,
This Day of Wrath, this Endless Wail,
This dread Apocalypse!
Valuation
by John Greenleaf Whittier

The old Squire said, as he stood by his gate,
And his neighbor, the Deacon, went by,
"In spite of my bank stock and real estate,
You are better off, Deacon, than I.
"We're both growing old, and the end's drawing near,
You have less of this world to resign,
But in Heaven's appraisal your assets, I fear,
Will reckon up greater than mine.
"They say I am rich, but I'm feeling so poor,
I wish I could swap with you even
The pounds I have lived for and laid up in store
For the shillings and pence you have given."
"Well, Squire," said the Deacon, with shrewd common sense,
While his eye had a twinkle of fun,
"Let your pounds take the way of my shillings and pence,
And the thing can be easily done!"