DanFosing/public-domain-poetry huggingface dataset:
The Welcome and Farewell.
by George Pope Morris

To meet, and part, as we have met and parted,
One moment cherished and the next forgot,
To wear a smile when almost broken-hearted,
I know full well is hapless woman's lot;
Yet let me, to thy tenderness appealing,
Avert this brief but melancholy doom--
Content that close beside the thorn of feeling,
Grows memory, like a rose, in guarded bloom.
Love's history, dearest, is a sad one ever,
Yet often with a smile I've heard it told!
Oh, there are records of the heart which never
Are to the scrutinizing gaze unrolled!
My eyes to thine may scarce again aspire--
Still in thy memory, dearest let me dwell,
And hush, with this hope, the magnetic wire,
Wild with our mingled welcome and farewell!
To Oratists
by Walt Whitman

To Oratists, to male or female,
Vocalism, measure, concentration, determination, and the divine power to use words.
Are you full-lung'd and limber-lipp'd from long trial? from vigorous practice? from physique?
Do you move in these broad lands as broad as they?
Come duly to the divine power to use words?
For only at last, after many years, after chastity, friendship, procreation, prudence, and nakedness;
After treading ground and breasting river and lake;
After a loosen'd throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes;
After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and removing obstructions;
After these, and more, it is just possible there comes to a man, a woman, the divine power to use words.
Then toward that man or that woman, swiftly hasten all, None refuse, all attend;
Armies, ships, antiquities, the dead, libraries, paintings, machines, cities, hate, despair, amity, pain, theft, murder, aspiration, form in close ranks;
They debouch as they are wanted to march obediently through the mouth of that man, or that woman.
O I see arise orators fit for inland America;
And I see it is as slow to become an orator as to become a man;
And I see that all power is folded in a great vocalism.
Of a great vocalism, the merciless light thereof shall pour, and the storm rage,
Every flash shall be a revelation, an insult,
The glaring flame on depths, on heights, on suns, on stars,
On the interior and exterior of man or woman,
On the laws of Nature, on passive materials,
On what you called death, (and what to you therefore was death,
As far as there can be death.)
Transmutation
by Madison Julius Cawein

To me all beauty that I see
Is melody made visible:
An earth-translated state, may be,
Of music heard in Heaven or Hell.
Out of some love-impassioned strain
Of saints, the rose evolved its bloom;
And, dreaming of it here again,
Perhaps re-lives it as perfume.
Out of some chant that demons sing
Of hate and pain, the sunset grew;
And, haply, still remembering,
Re-lives it here as some wild hue.
Recipe for an actor:
by Unknown

To one slice of ham add assortment of roles.
Steep the head in mash notes till it swells,
Garnish with onions, tomatoes and beets,
Or with eggs - from afar - in the shells.
- Life.
The Winds
by Clark Ashton Smith

To me the winds that die and start,
And strive in wars that never cease,
Are dearer than the level peace
That lies unstirred at summer's heart;
More dear to me the shadowed wold,
Where, with report of tempest rife,
The air intensifies with life,
Than quiet fields of summer's gold.
I am the winds' admitted friend:
They seal our linked fellowships
With speech of warm or icy lips,
With touch of west and east that blend.
And when my spirit listless stands,
With folded wings that do not live,
Their own assuageless wings they give
To lift her from the stirless lands.
*        *        *        *        *
Within the place unmanifest
Where central Truth is immanent,
Lies there a vast, entire content
Of sound and movement one in rest?
I know not this. Yet in my heart,
I feel that where all truths concur,
The shrine is peaceless with the stir
Of winds that enter and depart.
Poverty The Greatest Pack.
by Robert Herrick

To mortal men great loads allotted be,
But of all packs, no pack like poverty.
Welcome Home
by Thomas Hardy

To my native place
Bent upon returning,
Bosom all day burning
To be where my race
Well were known, 'twas much with me
There to dwell in amity.
Folk had sought their beds,
But I hailed: to view me
Under the moon, out to me
Several pushed their heads,
And to each I told my name,
Plans, and that therefrom I came.
"Did you? . . . Ah, 'tis true
I once heard, back a long time,
Here had spent his young time,
Some such man as you . . .
Good-night." The casement closed again,
And I was left in the frosty lane.
Nursery Rhyme. CCCCXXXIII. Jingles.
by Unknown

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
Home again, home again, dancing a jig;
Ride to the market to buy a fat hog,
Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.
To E. H. K. On The Receipt Of A Familiar Poem
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

To me, like hauntings of a vagrant breath
From some far forest which I once have known,
The perfume of this flower of verse is blown.
Tho' seemingly soul-blossoms faint to death,
Naught that with joy she bears e'er withereth.
So, tho' the pregnant years have come and flown,
Lives come and gone and altered like mine own,
This poem comes to me a shibboleth:
Brings sound of past communings to my ear,
Turns round the tide of time and bears me back
Along an old and long untraversed way;
Makes me forget this is a later year,
Makes me tread o'er a reminiscent track,
Half sad, half glad, to one forgotten day!
The City And The Sea
by Emily Pauline Johnson

I
To none the city bends a servile knee;
Purse-proud and scornful, on her heights she stands,
And at her feet the great white moaning sea
Shoulders incessantly the grey-gold sands, - 
One the Almighty's child since time began,
And one the might of Mammon, born of clods;
For all the city is the work of man,
But all the sea is God's.
II
And she - between the ocean and the town - 
Lies cursed of one and by the other blest:
Her staring eyes, her long drenched hair, her gown,
Sea-laved and soiled and dank above her breast.
She, image of her God since life began,
She, but the child of Mammon, born of clods,
Her broken body spoiled and spurned of man,
But her sweet soul is God's.
The Divine Image
by William Blake

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine:
And Peace the human dress.
Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine:
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
Zophiel. Stanzas
by Maria Gowen Brooks

To meet a friendship such as mine
Such feelings must thy heart refine
As seldom mortal mind gives birth,
'Tis love, without a stain of earth,
Fratello del mio cor.
Tho' friendship be its earthly name
All pure, from highest heaven, it came
'Tis never felt for more than one,
And scorns to dwell with Venus' son
Fratello del mio cor.
Him let it view not, or it flies
Like tender hues of morning-skies,
Or morn's sweet flower, of purple glow.
When sunny beams too ardent grow
Fratello del mio cor.
It's food is looks, its nectar, sighs,
Its couch the lip, its throne the eyes
The soul its breath; and so possest,
Heaven's raptures reign in mortal breast.
Fratello del mio cor.
Sonet 12
by Michael Drayton

To nothing fitter can I thee compare,
Then to the sonne of some rich penyfather,
Who hauing now brought on his end with care,
Leaues to his son all he had heap'd together;
This newe rich nouice, lauish of his chest,
To one man giues, and on another spends,
Then here he ryots, yet amongst the rest,
Haps to lend some to one true honest friend.
Thy gifts thou in obscuritie doost wast,
False friends thy kindnes, borne but to deceiue thee,
Thy loue, that is on the unworthy plac'd,
Time hath thy beauty, which with age will leaue thee;
Onely that little which to me was lent,
I giue thee back, when all the rest is spent.
Mercy Philbrick's Choice.
by Helen Hunt Jackson

I.
To one who found us on a starless night,
All helpless, groping in a dangerous way,
Where countless treacherous hidden pitfalls lay,
And, seeing all our peril, flashed a light
To show to our bewildered, blinded sight,
By one swift, clear, and piercing ray,
The safe, sure path, - what words could reach the height
Of our great thankfulness? And yet, at most,
The most he saved was this poor, paltry life
Of flesh, which is so little worth its cost,
Which eager sows, but may not stay to reap,
And so soon breathless with the strain and strife,
Its work half-done, exhausted, falls asleep.
II.
But unto him who finds men's souls astray
In night that they know not is night at all,
Walking, with reckless feet, where they may fall
Each moment into deadlier deaths than slay
The flesh, - to him whose truth can rend away
From such lost souls their moral night's black pall, - 
Oh, unto him what words can hearts recall
Which their deep gratitude finds fit to say?
No words but these, - and these to him are best: - 
That, henceforth, like a quenchless vestal flame,
His words of truth shall burn on Truth's pure shrine;
His memory be truth worshipped and confessed;
Our gratitude and love, the priestess line,
Who serve before Truth's altar, in his name.
For A Grotto
by Mark Akenside

To me, whom in their lays the shepherds call
Actaea, daughter of the neighbouring stream,
This cave belongs. The fig-tree and the vine,
Which o'er the rocky entrance downward shoot,
Were plac'd by Glycon. He with cowslips pale,
Primrose, and purple lychnis, deck'd the green
Before my threshold, and my shelving walls
With honeysuckle cover'd. Here at noon,
Lull'd by the murmur of my rising fount,
I slumber: here my clustering fruits I tend;
Or from the humid flowers, at break of day,
Fresh garlands weave, and chace from all my bounds
Each thing impure or noxious. Enter-in,
O stranger, undismay'd. nor bat, nor toad
Here lurks: and if thy breast of blameless thoughts
Approve thee, not unwelcome shalt thou tread
My quiet mansion: chiefly, if thy name
Wise Pallas and the immortal muses own.
On A Squinting Poetess.
by Thomas Moore

To no one Muse does she her glance confine,
But has an eye, at once, to all the Nine!
A Quibbling Elegy On Judge Boat
by Jonathan Swift

To mournful ditties, Clio, change thy note,
Since cruel fate has sunk our Justice Boat;
Why should he sink, where nothing seem'd to press
His lading little, and his ballast less?
Tost in the waves of this tempestuous world,
At length, his anchor fix'd and canvass furl'd,
To Lazy-hill[1] retiring from his court,
At his Ring's end[2] he founders in the port.
With water[3] fill'd, he could no longer float,
The common death of many a stronger boat.
A post so fill'd on nature's laws entrenches:
Benches on boats are placed, not boats on benches.
And yet our Boat (how shall I reconcile it?)
Was both a Boat, and in one sense a pilot.
With every wind he sail'd, and well could tack:
Had many pendants, but abhorr'd a Jack.[4]
He's gone, although his friends began to hope,
That he might yet be lifted by a rope.
Behold the awful bench, on which he sat!
He was as hard and ponderous wood as that:
Yet when his sand was out, we find at last,
That death has overset him with a blast.
Our Boat is now sail'd to the Stygian ferry,
There to supply old Charon's leaky wherry;
Charon in him will ferry souls to Hell;
A trade our Boat[5] has practised here so well:
And Cerberus has ready in his paws
Both pitch and brimstone, to fill up his flaws.
Yet, spite of death and fate, I here maintain
We may place Boat in his old post again.
The way is thus: and well deserves your thanks:
Take the three strongest of his broken planks,
Fix them on high, conspicuous to be seen,
Form'd like the triple tree near Stephen's Green:[6]
And, when we view it thus with thief at end on't,
We'll cry; look, here's our Boat, and there's the pendant.
The Epitaph
Here lies Judge Boat within a coffin:
Pray, gentlefolks, forbear your scoffing.
A Boat a judge! yes; where's the blunder?
A wooden judge is no such wonder.
And in his robes you must agree,
No boat was better deckt than he.
'Tis needless to describe him fuller;
In short, he was an able sculler.[7]
Orifice
by Paul Cameron Brown

To perforate in adumbration,
as obviator, the sphincter muscle
of intensity; then paint
the world in aperture,
a picture of one's mind.
Sonnet VII
by Alan Seeger

To me, a pilgrim on that journey bound
Whose stations Beauty's bright examples are,
As of a silken city famed afar
Over the sands for wealth and holy ground,
Came the report of one - a woman crowned
With all perfection, blemishless and high,
As the full moon amid the moonlit sky,
With the world's praise and wonder clad around.
And I who held this notion of success:
To leave no form of Nature's loveliness
Unworshipped, if glad eyes have access there, - 
Beyond all earthly bounds have made my goal
To find where that sweet shrine is and extol
The hand that triumphed in a work so fair.
The Pomander Bracelet.
by Robert Herrick

To me my Julia lately sent
A bracelet richly redolent:
The beads I kissed, but most lov'd her
That did perfume the pomander.
The Road To Marykirk
by Violet Jacob

To Marykirk ye'll set ye forth,
An' whustle as ye step alang,
An' aye the Grampians i' the North
Are glow'rin' on ye as ye gang.
By Martin's Den, through beech an' birk,
A breith comes soughin', sweet an' strang,
Alang the road to Marykirk.
Frae mony a field ye'll hear the cry
O' teuchits,[1] skirlin' on the wing,
Noo East, noo West, amang the kye,
An smell o' whins the wind 'll bring;
Aye, lad, it blaws a thocht to mock
The licht o' day on ilka thing - 
For you, that went yon road last spring,
Are lying deid in Flanders, Jock.
On His Eightieth Birthday
by Walter Savage Landor

To my ninth decade I have tottered on,
And no soft arm bends now my steps to steady;
She, who once led me where she would, is gone,
So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready.
Give Yourself A Show (New Years Eve)
by Henry Lawson

To my fellow sinners all, who, in hope and doubt,
Through the Commonwealth to-night watch the Old Year out,
New Year's Resolutions are jerry-built I know,
But I want to say to you, 'Give yourselves a show'.
You who drink for drinking's sake, love for lust alone,
Thinking heaven is a myth and the world your own,
Dancing gaily down to hell in the devil's dance,
This I have to say to you: 'Give your souls a chance'.
You who drink because of shame that you think will last,
Or because of wrong done you, trouble in the past,
'Nothing left to live for now,' you will say, I know;
But you have your own self yet, give that self a show!
You who want all things on earth, money, love, and fame
Having the advantage of worldly place or name,
You who have more than you want, even than you know,
In the glorious New Year give someone else a show.
You, the mischief-makers all, who in secret glee
Love to tell the villainies of a scamp like me;
There are things he'll never tell, things you'll never know,
Look into your own lives first, give the man a show.
You, the politician, who, for jealousy or gold,
Or for mean ambition, sell, or see your country sold,
Pandering to the hollow crowd, toadying to the low,
For shame's sake banish selfishness, give your land a show.
Poetry.
by George Pope Morris

To me the world's an open book
Of sweet and pleasant poetry;
I read it in the running brook
That sings its way toward the sea.
It whispers in the leaves of trees,
The swelling grain, the waving grass,
And in the cool, fresh evening breeze
That crisps the wavelets as they pass.
The flowers below, the stars above,
In all their bloom and brightness given,
Are, like the attributes of love,
The poetry of earth and heaven.
Thus Nature's volume, read aright,
Attunes the soul to minstrelsy,
Tinging life's clouds with rosy light,
And all the world with poetry.
The Sonnets CIV - To me, fair friend, you never can be old
by William Shakespeare

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey'd,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd,
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv'd;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceiv'd:
For fear of which, hear this thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.
Richard Savage
by William Ernest Henley

By J. M. Barrie and H. B. Marriott Watson, Criterion Theatre, April 16, 1891.
To other boards for pun and song and dance!
Our purpose is an essay in romance:
An old-world story where such old-world facts
As hate and love and death, through four swift acts - 
Not without gleams and glances, hints and cues,
From the dear bright eyes of the Comic Muse! - 
So shine and sound that, as we fondly deem,
They may persuade you to accept our dream:
Our own invention, mainly - though we take,
Somewhat for art but most for interest's sake
One for our hero who goes wandering still
In the long shadow of PARNASSUS HILL;
Scarce within eyeshot; but his tragic shade
Compels that recognition due be made,
When he comes knocking at the student's door,
Something as poet, if as blackguard more.
Poet and blackguard.    Of the first - how much?
As to the second, in quite perfect touch
With folly and sorrow, even shame and crime,
He lived the grief and wonder of his time!
Marked for reproaches from his life's beginning;
Extremely sinned against as well as sinning;
Hack, spendthrift, starveling, duellist in turn;
Too cross to cherish yet too fierce to spurn;
Begrimed with ink or brave with wine and blood;
Spirit of fire and manikin of mud;
Now shining clear, now fain to starve and skulk;
Star of the cellar, pensioner of the bulk;
At once the child of passion and the slave;
Brawling his way to an unhonoured grave - 
That was DICK SAVAGE!    Yet, ere his ghost we raise
For these more decent and less desperate days,
It may be well and seemly to reflect
That, howbeit of so prodigal a sect,
Since it was his to call until the end
Our greatest, wisest Englishman his friend,
'Twere all-too fatuous if we cursed and scorned
The strange, wild creature JOHNSON loved and mourned.
Nature is but the oyster - Art's the pearl:
Our DICK is neither sycophant nor churl.
Not as he was but as he might have been
Had the Unkind Gods been poets of the scene,
Fired with our fancy, shaped and tricked anew
To touch your hearts with love, your eyes with rue,
He stands or falls, ere he these boards depart,
Not as dead Nature but as living Art.
For My Own Tombstone
by Matthew Prior

To me 'twas given to die; to thee 'tis given
To live: alas! one moment sets us even.
Mark! how impartial is the will of Heaven!
Her Soul.
by Madison Julius Cawein

To me not only does her soul suggest
Palms and the peace of tropic shore and wood,
But, oceaned far beyond the golden West,
The Fortunate Islands of true Womanhood.
Sorrow. Song.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

To me this world's a dreary blank,
All hopes in life are gone and fled,
My high strung energies are sank,
And all my blissful hopes lie dead. -
The world once smiling to my view,
Showed scenes of endless bliss and joy;
The world I then but little knew,
Ah! little knew how pleasures cloy;
All then was jocund, all was gay,
No thought beyond the present hour,
I danced in pleasure's fading ray,
Fading alas! as drooping flower.
Nor do the heedless in the throng,
One thought beyond the morrow give[,]
They court the feast, the dance, the song,
Nor think how short their time to live.
The heart that bears deep sorrow's trace,
What earthly comfort can console,
It drags a dull and lengthened pace,
'Till friendly death its woes enroll. -
The sunken cheek, the humid eyes,
E'en better than the tongue can tell;
In whose sad breast deep sorrow lies,
Where memory's rankling traces dwell. -
The rising tear, the stifled sigh,
A mind but ill at ease display,
Like blackening clouds in stormy sky,
Where fiercely vivid lightnings play.
Thus when souls' energy is dead,
When sorrow dims each earthly view,
When every fairy hope is fled,
We bid ungrateful world adieu.
AUGUST, 1810.
The Bubble: A Song
by Robert Herrick

To my revenge, and to her desperate fears,
Fly, thou made bubble of my sighs and tears!
In the wild air, when thou hast roll'd about,
And, like a blasting planet, found her out;
Stoop, mount, pass by to take her eye, then glare
Like to a dreadful comet in the air:
Next, when thou dost perceive her fixed sight
For thy revenge to be most opposite,
Then, like a globe, or ball of wild-fire, fly,
And break thyself in shivers on her eye!
Sonnet X: To One Who Has Been Long In City Pent
by John Keats

To one who has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
Who is more happy, when, with heart's content,
Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair
Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair
And gentle tale of love and languishment?
Returning home at evening, with an ear
Catching the notes of Philomel, an eye
Watching the sailing cloudlet's bright career,
He mourns that day so soon has glided by:
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear
That falls through the clear ether silently.
Sonnets: Idea X
by Michael Drayton

To nothing fitter can I thee compare
Than to the son of some rich penny-father,
Who having now brought on his end with care,
Leaves to his son all he had heaped together.
This new rich novice, lavish of his chest,
To one man gives, doth on another spend;
Then here he riots; yet amongst the rest,
Haps to lend some to one true honest friend.
Thy gifts thou in obscurity dost waste:
False friends, thy kindness born but to deceive thee;
Thy love that is on the unworthy placed;
Time hath thy beauty which with age will leave thee.
Only that little which to me was lent,
I give thee back when all the rest is spent.
La Fuite De La Lune
by Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde

To outer senses there is peace,
A dreamy peace on either hand
Deep silence in the shadowy land,
Deep silence where the shadows cease.
Save for a cry that echoes shrill
From some lone bird disconsolate;
A corncrake calling to its mate;
The answer from the misty hill.
And suddenly the moon withdraws
Her sickle from the lightening skies,
And to her sombre cavern flies,
Wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze.
To One Who Teaches Me
by Louisa May Alcott

"To one who teaches me
The sweetness and the beauty
Of doing faithfully
And cheerfully my duty."
Nursery Rhyme. CCCCII. Lullabies.
by Unknown

To market, to market,
To buy a plum cake;
Home again, home again,
Ne'er a one baked;
The baker is dead and all his men,
And we must go to market again.
To Quintius Hirpinus
by Eugene Field

To Scythian and Cantabrian plots,
Pay them no heed, O Quintius!
So long as we
From care are free,
Vexations cannot cinch us.
Unwrinkled youth and grace, forsooth,
Speed hand in hand together;
The songs we sing
In time of spring
Are hushed in wintry weather.
Why, even flow'rs change with the hours,
And the moon has divers phases;
And shall the mind
Be racked to find
A clew to Fortune's mazes?
Nay; 'neath this tree let you and me
Woo Bacchus to caress us;
We're old, 't is true,
But still we two
Are thoroughbreds, God bless us!
While the wine gets cool in yonder pool,
Let's spruce up nice and tidy;
Who knows, old boy,
But we may decoy
The fair but furtive Lyde?
She can execute on her ivory lute
Sonatas full of passion,
And she bangs her hair
(Which is passing fair)
In the good old Spartan fashion.